Things certainly get off to a sordid start when a dead man is discovered in a Santa Fe park with his pants around his knees. It’s April 1945; the victim was an intelligence officer at Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were built. The project’s bosses bring in their own investigator, Michael Connolly, to find out if the murder was sex-related or politically motivated or if it somehow compromised the Manhattan Project. His sparring partner is the curmudgeonly but wise old Santa Fe sheriff. The love in- terest is provided by the wife of one of the project scientists, a beautiful jodhpur-clad Englishwoman, and if you’re not thinking Kristin Scott Thomas by the end of chapter two you’re reading a different book.
The big hitch with historical fiction is that we already know how it’s going to turn out. J. Robert Oppenheimer strolls through now and then, and there are a few scenes where the European scientists say things like ““You don’t believe in history here. Yet.’’ But mostly, Kanon avoids historical big shots and concentrates on the backstairs life around the project - the heat, the chamber-music evenings, dancing in a desert roadhouse with Billie Holiday on the jukebox. ““Los Alamos,’’ besides being a terrific mystery, wonderfully evokes the Southwest in the ’40s, reminding us in a dozen subtle ways that life goes on even while history is being made.
