THE CARBON MURDER

Nanotechnology simplified for the horsy set.

When MC, a chemical engineer recently resettled from Houston to Revere, Massachusetts, confides in her godmother, retired physicist and compulsive snoop Gloria Lamerino, that she thinks her old beau Jake is stalking her, Gloria (The Boric Acid Murder, 2002, etc.) is in a quandary. How can she help MC and still be at the side of her cancer-stricken live-in lover Matt Gennaro, a short but feisty cop? Since Matt is frequently passing out from medical mishaps and mostly immobilized in a drafty hospital gown, Gloria gets to pry into things with his partner and, alas, on her own. She tails transplanted Texans, ponders why veterinarians’ names appear on grants for highly technical human-oriented drug research, and stands helplessly by when bodies start dropping. But she does find time to swill a decent cup of coffee, diagram carbon molecules, expound on Buckminster Fuller’s influence on modern nanotechnology (“Bucky balls”), and figure out the connections between dead horses, dead people, and scientific fraud.

Okay, so Gloria’s a bit on the pedantic side, and Minichino’s idea of plotting is to toss in red herrings, then kill them off. But who could argue with such a deft handling of radiation therapy, contrary in-laws, and middle-age spread?