The mystery of a ‘ghost’ author, a prophetic novel and some social media sleuths

Margaret O’Donnell couldn’t be found.
The author of “The Beehive,” a 1980 novel of speculative fiction dealing with the kind of feminist issues that would later feature in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” O’Donnell had disappeared from view. And after the folks at Richmond, Virginia-based Valancourt Books spent three months trying to locate the author or her estate in order to reprint the book, whose themes they thought resonated even