Brilliant geology editor Lucybelle Bledsoe is offered a job too good to pass up. Her new boss is a visionary climate scientist whose mission is to extract the first-ever complete ice cores from the Greenland icecap. Knowing the risks, she warily accepts the classified government position. If she were to fall in love again with a woman, she could lose everything.

Based on the true story of the author's aunt and namesake, and on the search to uncover her remarkable past, A Thin Bright Line encompasses Cold War intrigues, the origins of climate research, the joyful pangs of love, and the impossible compromises of queer life in the 1950s and '60s.