Los Alamos – Joseph Kanon (1997)

Joseph Kanon’s Edgar Award-winning debut novel is a gripping historical thriller set in the shadow of the Manhattan Project during the final, tense weeks of World War II. When a security officer is found murdered at the secretive Los Alamos laboratory, Michael Connolly, a former war correspondent turned government investigator, is sent to discreetly uncover the truth. Amid the desert’s stark beauty and the lab’s feverish race to build the atomic bomb, Connolly navigates a web of espionage, personal betrayals, and moral dilemmas.

Kanon masterfully blends fact and fiction, weaving real figures like J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves into a plot thick with Soviet spies, compromised loyalties, and the looming ethical horror of Hiroshima. As Connolly falls for Emma, the enigmatic wife of a physicist, the lines between duty, love, and justice blur against the backdrop of history’s most consequential weapon.

“A bomb ticks at the heart of this novel—but the real explosion is in the souls of those who built it.”