Joe Kanon's new novel is another triumph of historical veracity and brilliant entertainment, and is also an ambitious synthesis of generational concerns, from the obsession with spies to the anti-War sentiments of the late sixties. Following the lives of Nick and his father, we are swept through Washington as McCarthyism strikes, transported to cold war Prague (where a grown-up Nick meets his father for the first time in almost 20 years, and then falls in love with the niece of the woman who died in the hotel room two decades earlier), and back to a Washington where the talk is of Saigon and marching on the Capitol. On the way there is a bloody murder, shocking revelations about the past, a passionate affair, and spies everywhere you look.

All the elements that made "Los Alamos" a smash hit are here -- the interweaving of historical time and place with a wonderful fictional story; anothersteamy love affair; and an explosive, Hitchcockian ending that will leave readers gasping. It's a wonderful "V/hat-if" tale with the same literate, readable, and "unputdownable" power of his first novel.