Joseph Kanon began his career in publishing while an undergraduate at Harvard, reading manuscripts for The Atlantic Monthly. Kanon traveled to England for graduate school, then returned to the United States to work as a book review editor and writer for the Saturday Review. Rising through the ranks of the publishing world, he eventually became president and CEO of E.P. Dutton, and then executive vice president of Houghton Mifflin's Trade and Reference Division. Kanon is the author of Los Alamos (1997), an authentic fictional recreation of the waning days of World War II during which the murder of one of the Manhattan Project's security officers occurs. The Prodigal Spy was published in late 1998. His novel, Leaving Berlin, is a 2015 New York Times bestseller.