New York Times best seller • "The suspense novel for all others to beat...[a] must read." (The Denver Post)

Winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel

It is the spring of 1945, and in a dusty, remote community, the world’s most brilliant minds have come together in secret. Their mission: to split an atom and end a war. But among those who have come to Robert Oppenheimer’s "enchanted campus" of foreign-born scientists, baffled guards, and restless wives is a simple man in search of a killer. Michael Connolly has been sent to the middle of nowhere to investigate the murder of a security officer on the Manhattan Project. But amid the glimmering cocktail parties and the staggering genius, Connolly will find more than he bargained for. Sleeping in a dead man’s bed and making love to another man’s wife, Connolly has entered the moral no-man’s-land of Los Alamos. For in this place of brilliance and discovery, hope and horror, Connolly is plunged into a shadowy war with a killer - as the world is about to be changed forever.

Praise for Los Alamos

"A magnificent work of fiction...a love story inside a murder mystery inside perhaps the most significant story of the twentieth century: the making of the atomic bomb." (The Boston Globe)

"Compelling...[Joseph Kanon] pulls the reader into a historical drama of excitement and high moral seriousness." (The New York Times)

"Thrilling...Kanon writes with the sure hand of a veteran and does a marvelous job." (The Washington Post Book World)