South Bay Beat by Joyce Krieg
The summer of 1960: The Soviets and Ike are playing a high-stakes game of brinksmanship over the U-2 spy plane incident, Kennedy and Nixon are going mano a mano for the U.S. presidency, and the defense industry is rapidly paving over paradise in the South Bay—the region that one day would be famed the world over as Silicon Valley. Enter the world of SOUTH BAY BEAT, a 90,000 word historical thriller.
Del Verhalden is a scrappy young reporter hungry for a career-making story. When local authorities are all too eager to cover up the death of a young woman found on the muddy shores of the bay, he teams up with a beatnik disc jockey and an annoyingly nosy ten-year-old to expose the truth. The case threatens to topple the aerospace industry that brought the first generation of tech geeks to the South Bay and sends fingers of suspicion far beyond the valley as the threat of nuclear annihilation hangs over the planet. Based on real people, places, and top-secret projects, as well as information in previously-classified documents, SOUTH BAY BEAT sends readers back in time to the dark side of the Camelot era—think “Mad Men” with a murder—and offers perspective on how this obscure farming community transformed itself into the high-tech capital of the world.
I’m a traditionally published author with three mysteries from St. Martin’s Minotaur. SOUTH BAY BEAT is built upon my own experiences growing up during the dawning days of Silicon Valley.
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