The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 23 July 2008
by Camille Minichino
As in many genres, there is a formula an author may follow to assemble a successful mystery novel. A mere formula, though, isn't sufficient. A writer needs talent and wit to pull it off. Fitting something quirky, significant or idiosyncratic into the expected mystery novel takes skill. Sometimes, seemingly preposterous agglomerations of personality result, but nevertheless work to some extent. We may still get an entertainment out of it. These are some thoughts that come to mind while reading Camille Minichino's first Periodic Table mystery. We meet Gloria Lamerino, a physicist who spent years in California doing research before retiring to her home town of Revere, Massachusetts. There, she takes up residence in an apartment over a funeral home, buys the home's cast-off black Cadillac, writes occasional physics lectures for school kids, brushes off the attentions of a man who has pined for her these thirty years, and contracts with the local police department to help investigate the scientific side of their cases, particularly murder cases.
This reader hails from Everett, Massachusetts, the next town over from Revere, and which is mentioned in this novel (notable, because Everett is normally forgettable and rarely appears in any cultural context). Revere is a small city with the oldest public beach in the country. One doesn't think of it as a hotbed of scientific research, a place where a physicist might get murdered for his inconvenient conclusions. So, while Minichino evokes the landscape of blue-collar Boston suburbs with much success, the overall setup seems just a bit over the edge of plausibility, just a tad overstated. Add to that the occasionally silly behavior of the narrator, as when Gloria refuses to pass on information to the police officer she works for, seemingly because it embarrasses her, and the reader might find plausibility strained. Still, within all of this, Minichino pulls off a straightforward entertainment that has a personality all its own.
Eric, a researcher who worked with Gloria back in California, is relocated to Revere, where he works on an experiment developing superconductivity through metallic hydrogen at room temperature. The ability to make this work would be profoundly profitable to its developers. But he finds a glitch in the data and doesn't live to tell the tale. All of the suspects are acquaintances of our protagonist, which makes one wonder why the police would have her join this particular investigation. Meanwhile, she harbors a girlish crush on Matt, the officer she works with. Gloria tumbles through the investigation, making what appear to be alarming missteps along the way. By the end of the story, Gloria begins to realize her naive approach to investigations, another crime is committed, and her romantic yearnings begin to bear fruit. That the character begins to grow in the final third of the novel redeems the book at the end. The characters are fairly thin, but perhaps continue to grow and develop through the subsequent novels in Minichino's series. There are notes of humanity here and there, and a flawed protagonist who, at last, has some sense of her limits.
Also by Minichino: [The Helium Murder] [The Lithium Murder] [The Beryllium Murder] [The Boric Acid Murder] [The Carbon Murder]
See Also: [In Revere, In Those Days by Roland Merullo]