When a mature student’s groundbreaking engineering software detects bodies buried near an environmentally controversial pipeline, she’s targeted by a violent white supremacist militia. 

SYNOPSIS:

Five years ago, Kate Bradley’s charmed life plunged into darkness when her father, a successful California criminal lawyer, got an accused killer released on a technicality. The ensuing on-line bullying by her uni classmates, urging her to take a dirt nap, drove her from the classroom to the bars, estrangement from her father and two DUI convictions. The court gave her a choice: jail or Alcoholics Anonymous. A year later, her AA sponsor, an ex-MMA fighter, trained her to fight and offered to pay for Kate’s tuition—if she stayed clean.

Now four years sober, Kate (30) is so driven to redeem herself and so frightened of failure that she surged to the top of her third-year engineering class at Idaho State U and won a coveted internship, testing software that drone-scans oil pipelines for stress fractures before they leak. Kate has secretly designed complementary technology that probes for carbon leaks.

One quiet Sunday, Kate tries out her software on a long-finished section of a pipeline when a car suddenly crashes through the gate and ploughs into a nearby bog. When she courageously leaps into the bog to break the driver’s window, three rattlesnakes swim out of the car. She pulls the victim from the car but he has succumbed to their venomous bites.

Flying overhead in her hot air balloon, Jani O’Brien, 30, a local Métis, sees the crash, lands and helps. When that leads to friendship, Kate confides in Jani that her software has detected below-ground carbon. But instead of a leak, their midnight dig exposes a decomposed body. Just managing to flee before security arrives, Kate begs Jani to delay reporting the body until Kate can do so without having to admit she trespassed on pipeline land, which would jeopardize her internship, her tuition and her degree. Worried the body might be one of three missing Indigenous anti-pipeline environmentalists and her friends, Jani gives Kate 24 hours.

But Kate’s snooping has come to the attention of its wealthy owner, Keon Grail, 60s. Determined not to lose his pipeline’s 15-million-dollar payoff, Grail tries to frighten Kate via his white supremacist militia. When they fail to intimidate her, Grail orders his henchmen to kidnap Kate, force alcohol down her throat and put her behind the wheel of a car they propel over a cliff with another of Grail’s victims on board. Kate survives but is charged with her third DUI and vehicular homicide, which leads to her dismissal from her engineering program.

On the verge of suicide, Kate gets wind of Grail’s plan to attack Jani and intercepts the two killers—fatally. Kate and Jani confront Grail, who admits to his crimes, including killing the young man in the car who was blackmailing him. But Grail tells them he’s so rich, he’ll never see the inside of a jail and offers to buy their silence with five million dollars. Unable to let Grail get away with murdering her Native American friends, Jani shoots him. Kate takes a page from her father’s legal approach to convincingly make it look like self defense.

No longer fearing failure, Kate takes a year off to join Jani in helping the Native American community heal from Grail’s brutal ambition and to heal the rift with her own father.

Themes: Like Thelma and Louise, Insight fights the constraints of gender in a patriarchal society; like Thunderheart, it underscores environmental and Native American vulnerabilities; and, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Kate uses her skills, both intellectual and physical, to right past wrongs. It also raises the point that an obsession, even with an honorable objective, can warp one’s moral compass, as Kate learns while rehabilitating her reputation.