The Lithium Murder: A Gloria Lamerino Mystery

Gloria Lamerino, 56, amply proportioned and turning gray, makes for an unlikely sleuth. Yet as her quietly engrossing third outing (after The Hydrogen Murder and The Helium Murder) quickly shows, the former Berkeley physics professor brings sharply defined skills to her new job as science consultant to the Revere (Mass.) Police Department. As depicted in a prologue related in the third person (the rest of the novel is narrated by Lamerino), Michael Deramo, a janitor in the physics department at the local university, has been strangled after overhearing a plot to conceal environmental hazards associated with the development of a new lithium battery. The two leading researchers on the project admit to police that they were about to bribe Deramo to keep quiet. But much more is going on. Deramo's snobby and upwardly mobile son, who regards the family patriarch as a social disaster, is a patent attorney who stands to make a fortune from the new product. As Lamerino, in her well-mannered way, interviews a daughter-in-law, a step-grandson and an evil-minded lawyer, she utilizes not only her considerable scientific background but also her shrewd and comprehensive knowledge of Italian history, mores and family dynamics. Narrative suspense is buoyed further by Lamerino's low-key romance with a homicide detective. This is a tightly knit story with a heroine so refreshingly different that readers will be pleased to note that Minichino, herself a retired physicist, has 104 elements from the periodic table left to go. Agent, Elaine Koster. (May)