Los Angeles psychologist, Dr. Cory Johnson, has turned down a proposal of marriage from the man who means everything to her. The word “marriage” makes her stomach flip with fear. Never having known her father and only ten when her steelworker mother mysteriously disappeared, Cory finds safety – but not happiness – in her solitary life.
While testifying in a court case involving retrieval of traumatic memories, Cory experiences flashbacks of her childhood. She realizes that to heal herself, she must unearth the truth: who was her mother and why did she vanish? Her investigation takes her to the Pittsburgh “steel valley” where she is poised to lift the lid on evidence that steel CEOs, union bosses and Klan members will stop at nothing to keep buried.
* * *
“Sometimes a book comes along that straddles the line between fact and fiction to great effect. As a former steelworker, local union dissident and rebel from the mid-1970s to 1987, I can personally testify that MOLTEN MURDER is such a book.
It is the story of a woman steelworker, Ginny Johnson, who faces the seemingly insurmountable odds of an industrial work place rife with machismo tradition, a company whose sole concern is the bottom line, and complacent union officials concerned only with feathering their own beds. A single mother, dating an African-American and assigned to one of the most dangerous places in the mill, Ginny learns of the secret corporate plans to ‘downsize’ the lives of over 90,000 steelworkers and to wipe-out the industry. Driven to organize her fellow workers to save their jobs, her actions rattle formidable foes: company, union and KKK. One night Ginny disappears in the middle of her midnight shift, never to be seen again.
Twenty years later, her daughter, spurred on by the same indomitable spirit, returns to the mill town to solve the mystery of her mother’s disappearance. If you’ve ever worked in a factory, steel mill, coal mine, lived in a rustbelt town, or you just love a book filled with suspense and drama, MOLTEN MURDER will keep you on edge. You won’t want to put it down till you reach the last page.”
Mike Stout
Former Grievance Chairman
Steelworkers Union Local 1397
Historic Homestead Works
* * *
“In the 1990’s, the American steel industry committed suicide, hanging tens of thousands of steelworkers out to dry. From the scalding conditions of working around molten steel and the blistering hostility that confronted women steelworkers to the Board rooms of industry where profit topped human lives, MOLTEN MURDER tells that story. It is a murder mystery told with grit.”
Virginia Hildebrand
Former Laborer
Jones & Laughlin-Pittsburgh Works
Member USWA
Purchase through Amazon: