Los Alamos

A Novel

By: Joseph Kanon

Narrated by: Edward Herrmann

Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

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)

©1997 Joseph Kanon (P)1997 Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, A Division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

"The atmospherics are exactly right: Los Alamos brings back an era when a secret was really a secret and a lie wasn't necessarily a sin." (Entertainment Weekly)

Moving Story

Story works very well. Performance distracts with sometimes muddy acoustics. Overall an excellent audio recording.

stop the music

Narration excellent. However the music in between chapters and towards the end was terrible. Very distracting

Great period piece, first rate narrator

Complex and believable WWII era story with the development of the atomic bomb as a backdrop. The two main characters are engaging and adequately life-like that you care what happens to them. Lots of twists, and I could find no internal contradictions. I am surprised at the low ratings given by others - I suspect they were looking for something else. From my point of view, narrator Edward Herman simply reading a random newspaper story would get a score to at least 3 stars.

Good, but...

I agree that the plot is well done and interesting, but lets lose the annoying background "music" that obscures the words at chapter breaks. Otherwise well read.

unnecessary music

Lose the ridiculous and annoying music.
The voices were very similar making it difficult to differentiate the speakers.

Compelling story, but flawed audio presentation!

I agree with all the previous reviews disparaging the overly dramatic and extraneous and unnecessary musical additions to the narrative. They do NOTHING to improve the audiobook. Narrator is fine. You at Audible have had enough complaints now to re-master the recording and take out EVERYTHING but the narrator. As for the story. . .I found the ending a bit preachy and pat as well as quite abrupt. But overall I really enjoyed the story and am now looking forward to watching the movie "Oppenheimer" in conjunction. Also looking forward to more Kanon titles.

Horrible recording sound, but story is interesting

This audiobook was most likely recorded on tape many years ago, so the sound is like being in a tunnel or submarine. Story similar to Kanon's other books, and because I have head other books--I could guess the ending. Still, all in all, for a murder mystery it did keep me interested.

Great book, irritating music

Some events are worth music, like deaths and explosions. The routine and random music was annoying.

Classic Crime Writing and Fine Historical Fiction

I always read historical fiction with a degree of dread that at any moment the work will descend into a superficial gloss of actual events. We're always just happening upon some heretofore unknown figure as he or she is about to make a discovery or take an action that will change the course of humankind. In LOS ALAMOS, Joseph Kanon avoids the pitfalls of the genre by diving headlong into a setting where encounters with titanic figures and momentous events aren't so much coincidental as inevitable.

Set during the final stages of the Manhattan Project, LOS ALAMOS is both classic crime writing and superb historical fiction. Kanon has clearly done extensive research into the personalities and activities that led to the development of the atomic bomb, but he uses that background knowledge judiciously. Rather than being compelled to trot out every fact worth noting about Los Alamos, Kanon respects the reader's intelligence and only uses details that are relevant to the narrative. He introduces people and reports events in a way that suggests that he expects us to have some prior familiarity with them. I'm anything but an expert on the era in question, but his portrait of Robert Oppenheimer as a high-strung, slightly aloof personality feels credible.

IMPORTANT: As many have noted, the sound quality of this recording is execrable, and the music transitions at chapter breaks is horribly distorted. Even so, I would hate for listeners to be turned away from this audiobook because of these limitations. There is a silver lining to the fact that this is an old recording: Edward Herrmann's performance is the kind of commanding voice that we seldom hear anymore. He projects a tone of confident masculinity that today has given way to bombast and bluster. He does very well with accents, the only drawback being that female characters tend to sound a tad like men in drag.

Slow Start but fascinating

Joseph Kanin is an elegant and intelligent writer, not given to blood, gore, or oversexed characters. This one takes off casually but builds to something important halfway there. Excellent ! and Ed Herrmann the narrator, is a lost star.