Bones of Betrayal

ON FACT AND FICTION

It’s with no small amount of trepidation that we’ve dared to spin a fictional tale of murder and espionage against the epic backdrop of World War II, the Manhattan Project, and Oak Ridge. We’ve mentioned many historical characters, including General Leslie Groves and physicists Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer, because no story about the Manhattan Project would seem credible without those famous, larger-than-life figures. However, our plot and our main Oak Ridge characters — Beatrice, the storyteller; Novak, the murdered scientist; and Isabella, the librarian — are creations of pure fiction.

We’ve tried to follow the chronology of Oak Ridge and the Manhattan Project faithfully, with one notable, willful departure: the uranium storage bunker that figures prominently in the story was not built until 1947. But the camouflage scheme chosen for it by General Groves — a rustic Tennessee barn and silo — was simply too good to pass up.