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Los Alamos
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Los Alamos
Unavailable
Los Alamos
Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

Los Alamos

Written by Joseph Kanon

Narrated by Edward Herrmann

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

In a dusty, remote community of secretly constructed buildings and awesome possibility, the world's most brilliant minds have come together. 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, an unraveler of human secrets-a man in search of a killer.

It is the spring of 1945. And Michael Connolly has been sent to Los Alamos 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 discovery and secrecy, hope and horror, Connolly is plunged into a shadowy war with a killer-as the world is about to be changed forever....


From the Paperback edition.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 4, 2000
ISBN9780553754179
Unavailable
Los Alamos
Author

Joseph Kanon

Joseph Kanon is the Edgar Award–winning author of Los Alamos and nine other novels: The Prodigal Spy, Alibi, Stardust, Istanbul Passage, Leaving Berlin, Defectors, The Accomplice, The Berlin Exchange, and The Good German, which was made into a major motion picture starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett. Other awards include the Hammett Award of the International Association of Crime Writers and the Human Writes Award of the Anne Frank Foundation. He lives in New York City.

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Reviews for Los Alamos

Rating: 3.573863494318182 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

176 ratings13 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm reading his novels out of order and just got to the first one here, Los Alamos. It is a mix of a period piece and a police procedural. He's got the period and setting nailed. His stock male and female protagonists are by now familiar to me. They are old Studio Hollywood to a T. The hard knuckled truth seeker [think Bogart as Sam Spade] and the damaged femme fatale [think Becall opposite him]. The ending is lame but less so than his norm [strange - he gets worse with practice on those]. All in all it is an most enjoyable read and for a change you are not sure of the true villains until the end. Loses one star for too much emphasis on the love affair but that could just be my taste. I will accept gratuitous sex scenes on HBO as without them the drama series I enjoy [Game of Thrones, Rome, Wire etc.] don't get made. In a novel, graphic sex hasn't been especially shocking for decades, so I expect the scenes to actually advance the plot. In my opinion he has more of them than he needs. Your mileage may vary.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Uneven. Not as good as his later book "The Good German"
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Kanon's research into the history of the team who produced the atomic bomb is accurate. This is a character-driven thriller that is also historical fiction.Readers who love the ordinary formulaic thrillers are in for a new treat because this is not formulaic. Rather, LOS ALAMOS intelligently depicts that time and place, with fictional characters who drive the story. Formulaic thrillers are plot-driven and inferior to this. Kanon doesn't regurgitate the same type of thriller over and over with every book he writes.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Perhaps it is because I studied physics, but I truly enjoyed this book. I thought the characters, the story and politics were very believable, so I went with the story hook line and sinker.The World War 2 top secret science adds a nice flavor to a good story
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Kanon's become one of my favorites for the plot and the history that he weaves together. This is a well-written book with fascinating characters, and it draws you in from the beginning. This might be something you would have picked up at the grocerystore when it first came out, but I'd argue it's strong literary suspense with history and enjoyment in the bargain.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This is the story of the development of the atom bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. It is readable, but not compelling.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Enjoyable story blending a murder investigation into the backdrop of the days leading up to the first A-Bomb test. Excillent narration by Edward Herman.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    8
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An excellent, multi-layered mystery with a provacative bite. Investigating a murder, our lead character gets drawn into an an incestuous community of scientists driven to create an atomic bomb. "We have all learned to be monsters in this war." When the battle is joined, don't we risk becoming exactly what we suppose ourselves to be fighting? A thought-provoking and human exploration of moral choice.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An involving suspense novel, historically centered in the last months of the development of the first atomic bomb. A security man on the staff of the Manhattan Project is found dead in a compromising situation. A hook-up gone wrong? Or is something more sinister afoot?

    Having recently visited Los Alamos, I feel like Kanon has well-portrayed how life must half been in those early, intense days among the community of scientists/military up on "The Hill." The setting is well-portrayed, the story intricately plotted, and all the pieces of the mystery come satisfyingly together while raising larger questions about the new era that Manhattan Project was about to lauch.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a really good book. The mystery is very well crafted, and the author paints a very full portrait of the setting (Los Alamos during the Manhattan project) and the people involved in the project.

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The plot of Los Alamos hinges on a fictional protagonist, civilian intelligence liaison Michael Connolly, brought in to investigate the murder of a Los Alamos security officer, his face bashed in and his pants pulled down. Connolly is asked to discover whether the crime is more than the violent sex crime it appears to be, even while those associated with the project--paranoid over security leaks and the specter of Communists everywhere--would prefer it be just that. Nice and tidy. Of course it isn't nice and tidy, and Connolly's dogged determination to pursue the truth to the bitter end, no matter how bitter it turns out to be, carries him through acts of betrayal from all sides and his own growing interest and eventual affair with the wife of one of the Los Alamos scientists.The setting, in both New Mexico and Los Alamos, is very detailed and well researched. The most enjoyable aspect in many ways is the interaction between Connolly as a fictional character with the real-life Oppenheimer and General Groves, woven together neatly within the framework of the events leading up to the Trinity test in the desert on that fateful day on July 16, 1945.To be honest, the plot is fairly easy to figure out, at times almost taking a back seat to the setting. Some readers might quibble with the love interest feeling a bit unnecessary, and a few of the local characters lean a tad toward the cliched. The more restless and impatient readers may get a bit bogged down in Kanon's occasionally dense prose (not I, though), but he has some nice evocations of the tug-of-war of emotions that existed between the project's scientists and their almost abstract view of the war and the ultimate horror of the project's true purpose.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5

    It's the height of the Manhattan Project and one of the security officers at Los Alamos is murdered in circumstances which suggest a gay quarrel. But the project's military head wants to cover all possibilities and seconds intelligence officer Mike Connolly, an NYC investigative journalist in peacetime, to check that everything is as the cops think it is and there has been no security breach. Connolly does indeed find the waters are far murkier than anyone had thought possible; and in the process of his investigation enters into a very physical adulterous liaison with Emma, the English wife of one of the German scientists engaged in the project. While the historical details seem extremely authentic, including the portrayals of Oppenheimer (a major supporting player in the story) and some of the other physicists, and while the detection part of it all is absorbingly handled, I could have done with a little less of the love story; while that obsessive mutual infatuation is extremely convincingly depicted, I could have done with a bit less wordage devoted to it -- on grounds analogous to the truism that lovers' conversations and banter are a lot more interesting to the lovers themselves than they are to anyone else.

    One theme extremely pertinent to us today that came through loud and clear concerned the deadening effect of paranoid, over-eager security: historically, as we know, it hindered work on the project (and later Teller, shown in this book as an egocentric shit, was able to use it to destroy Oppie's career in a foretaste of Swiftboatery); here we see it having the effect of psychological handcuffs on Connolly as he attempts to solve the case, forcing him much of the time to be working against the efforts of the official security hierarchy.

    I've made a note to go looking for further novels by Kanon, because I did enjoy this, despite the qualification mentioned above.