Los Alamos - Joseph Kanon

Interweaving fact and fiction, Los Alamos is at once a powerful novel of historical intrigue and a vivid portrait of the most mysterious figures involved in the Manhattan Project: Robert Oppenheimer.

Spring 1945. As work on the first atomic bomb nears completion in New Mexico, Karl Bruner, a Manhattan Project security officer, is found murdered.

Michael Connolly, the intelligence officer brought in to crack Bruner's case, soon discovers that investigating a murder in Los Alamos - a town so secret it does not officially exist - is anything but easy. Only once he falls in love and begins an affair with Emma, the enigmatic wife of one of the scientists, does he truly begin to unravel the dark heart of the Project.

Elegantly written and deftly constructed, Los Alamos is the stunning debut novel of the author of Leaving Berlin and The Good German.

'Brilliantly captures the burgeoning Cold War paranoia'
Observer

'Accomplished and beautifully written'
Sunday Telegraph

'Enthralling . . . a dream of a novel'
Time Out