STEAMDRAGON: A Novel of Tomorrow’s Menace by Stephen Brown

Romance, suspense and hi-tech engineering highlight this new science fiction novel. The Pendragon was the ultimate product of 1950s advances in engineering. A revolutionary steam locomotive, it mysteriously crashed on its first run, claiming many lives.

Rachel Ewen stumbles on the story of the Pendragon disaster doing research for a cable television series. Eager to learn more, she calls Peter Selfridge, an engineer on the project who is days from retirement and equally eager to put the whole mess behind him forever.  Though he tries to convince Rachel there's no story to pursue, she sees right through him and her professional curiosity only grows stronger. Before long, she's stumbled on another key piece of the puzzle: the locomotive in the accident was the prototype for an entire fleet.

The more research she does, the more convoluted the story becomes, and the more unclear its purpose. Everyone involved seemed to have been aware that the locomotive would never sell, for one thing. For another, it takes little effort for Rachel to show that the official conclusion can't be correct; she decides that the true cause of the accident had to be murder or sabotage, but neither stand up to scrutiny. Rachel becomes convinced that Selfridge is hiding something. An attempt to recreate the Pendragon and its deadly trial run lead to another death and a shattering series of revelations...