It's 1942. Cynical about her missing-in-action former lover's patriotism, gossip columnist Jane Benjamin aims for a national byline, volunteering to find a picture-perfect Wendy-the-Welder poster girl; but when two top choices die, Jane must choose between personal ambition and service before the murderer kills another girl-and America's best chance of winning the war.
It's 1937. Jane has left her pregnant mother with a man she hates, left her father for dead in an irrigation ditch, remade herself as a man, and gotten a job as a copy boy. And everything's getting better--until her father turns up on her newspaper's front page in a picture that threatens to destroy the life she's making.
At the peak of Tommie O'Rourke's on-court triumph at the 1939 Wimbledon women's championship, her closest companion, Coach, drops dead of heart attack. Now gossip columnist Jane Benjamin's got to choose: score a big scoop reporting her friend Tommie's private life, or put herself in danger by investigating Coach's murder and its connection to a conspiracy involving US participation in the coming war?