Biographer Brenda Maddox recovers the life and scientific contributions of Rosalind Franklin, the crystallographer whose X-ray photographs of DNA were essential to Watson and Crick's discovery of the double helix structure, but who received little credit during her lifetime. Franklin, educated at Cambridge and trained in Paris, produced the famous 'Photo 51' that revealed DNA's helical structure, but her data was shared with Watson without her knowledge or consent. Maddox draws on Franklin's papers and interviews with colleagues to reconstruct both her scientific work and her experience as a woman in mid-century science. The book portrays Franklin as brilliant, rigorous, and often frustrated by the sexism of her professional environment, though Maddox complicates the image of Franklin as purely victim, showing her own difficult relationships with colleagues. Franklin died of ovarian cancer at 37, likely caused by her extensive work with X-rays, and thus was not considered for the Nobel Prize awarded to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins. The book examines how scientific credit is assigned and how Franklin's contributions were minimized and then gradually recovered. For readers interested in the history of science, gender discrimination in STEM fields, or simply a compelling life story, Maddox provides biography that is both scholarly and accessible.