By: Shelley Blanton-Stroud
ISBN: 978-1647429461
She Writes Press, 2025
2025 Sarton Finalist: Historical Fiction
For fans of Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code and Jacqueline Winspear’s The Consequences of Fear comes a gripping novel, set in post–WWII San Francisco, about a young female newspaper publisher and a story that could change the course of her city’s future.
In the jubilant aftermath of Japan’s surrender in World War II, San Francisco erupts in celebration. But for Sandy Zimmer, the thirty-two-year-old widow publisher of the Prospect newspaper, the revelry masks a darker truth. In the chaos of the VJ Day Peace Riot, eleven deaths and six rapes take place.
Driven by journalistic integrity and battling her own instincts to maintain peace, Sandy directs her paper to investigate the riot. Her quest for truth pits her against formidable adversaries: her controlling civic-leader father-in-law, the newspaper’s resistant board, and authorities desperate to bury the scandal as they vie to attract the United Nations Headquarters to San Francisco.
About the Author
Shelley Blanton-Stroud grew up in Bakersfied, California, the daughter of Dust Bowl immigrants who made good on their ambition to get out of the field. Recently retired from three decades teaching writing in the California State University system, first in San Francisco and then in Sacramento, she continues to consult with writers in the US energy industry. She has served as President of the Board of 916 Ink, an arts-based creative writing nonprofit for children, and currently serves on the Board of Advisors for the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at her alma mater, Claremont McKenna College, supporting programs for students and faculty in history, philosophy, literature and the arts. She previously co-directed Stories on Stage Sacramento, where actors performed the stories of established and emerging authors. Her historical mystery series—Copy Boy, Tomboy, and Poster Girl—follows Jane Benjamin, a cross-dressing, tomato-picking, San Francisco gossip columnist who investigates crime stories that never make the front page. Her fourth novel, An Unlikely Prospect (She Writes Press, August 2025), is based on the little-known 1945 V-J Day San Francisco Peace Riot, featuring a widow publisher who fights both to report a number of unacknowledged rapes and simultaneously find her voice in a male-dominated field, a theme that runs through Shelley’s work, ever since the day she enrolled in the first class of women to enter Claremont Men’s College as freshmen.
To learn more about Shelley Blanton-Stroud and her work, please see shelleyblantonstroud.com
