Los Alamos (1997)

Re-reading and taking a fresh look at Los Alamos, by Joseph Kanon, was the second follow-up to a previous post about the film Oppenheimer. Los Alamos was Kanon's debut novel, and its success launched a writing career that has since produced ten more historical novels, with no signs of slowing production.

Like Martin Cruz Smith's Stallion Gate, the setting for Los Alamos is the leadup to the August, 1945 first successful atomic bomb test. The common backdrop provides commonalities in the cast of historical characters. J. Robert Oppenheimer is a fictionalized self in both novels, and both fictional main protagonists have an intimate and unofficial relationship with the project director. Most other historical characters appearing under their own names have very limited roles in the novel's plot, while other persons and events are represented by fictional equivalents. 

For example, the actual death of physicist Harry Daghlian from radiation poisoning, after he accidentally dropped a plutonium bomb core, was repurposed in Los Alamos into a fictional subplot involving a fictional physicist's involvement in the murder. That's about as far as Kanon ever strayed from the historical facts. The fictional additions to the historical record maintain plausibility.

Kanon's main protagonist is Michael Connolly, a New York City newspaperman who is brought in to investigate the murder of the bomb project's head of security. The book's plot is the familiar mystery/thriller type of story, and Kanon did it very well, with all the requisite twists and reveals.

Los Alamos and Stallion Gate are both fine novels, sharing a common historical backdrop, and both are recommended as fictionalized accounts of a slice of the historical events contained in the the movie Oppenheimer. High marks for both on all of the five criteria.