I was lucky enough to meet Camille Minichino last year at Writers With Drinks, a literary event I host in San Francisco. I remember thinking, what could be more geeky? She not only works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, she also writes a series of mystery novels with a chemistry theme! They have titles like The Carbon Murder, The Oxygen Murder, The Helium Murder, The Boric Acid Murder, The Nitrogen Murder and The Beryllium Murder. I have the Carbon book and it’s awesome.
But now it turns out that Ann Parker, the woman Minichino shared an office with at Lawrence Livermore starting in 1978, is also a mystery novelist! Parker’s novels don’t actually have science themes, but they do a kick-ass female protagonist, Inez Stannert, and they take place during the silver rush in 1879.
Minichino’s own novels also have a female protagonist, a middle-aged physicist named Gloria Lamerino. Says Minichino:
I try to make it the norm… I pose the idea (that) here’s a woman and, by the way, she’s a physicist.
Minichino and Parker are reading at the San Leandro Main Library tomorrow.
She’s going through the first couple of elements, BTW. Wonder if there’s a Hydrogen murder…