★This is a brilliant thriller in constant balance between noir and the history of physics, scientific dissemination and mystery.
★★High school physics teacher Aldo Colombo suddenly disappeared, leaving behind only the formula for nuclear fission. His best student Theo and Hungarian teacher Deianila teamed up to investigate, embarking on a suspenseful pursuit journey.

A high school physics teacher, Aldo Colombo, disappears in Brescia on a Saturday in the fall of 1971. No note, no explanation. The teacher seems to have vanished into thin air as if he had never existed. Teo, a brilliant young mathematician and former favorite student of the teacher, cannot find peace: Colombo's disappearance cannot be voluntary, someone must have made him disappear, but why? Why kidnap a harmless physics teacher from a provincial high school? The only clue seems to be a bundle of formulas on neutrons and nuclear fission left by Colombo. Teo knows only one person who could help him find the teacher, and that person is Deianira, a young, precarious teacher of Hungarian origins who is dealing with a distant pain: a sharp, acute mind, with a disconcerting irony and a ferocious obstinacy. It is Deianira who leads the game, sniffing out leads, questioning possible witnesses, looking for keys to decipher the enigma. And so, the two find themselves swept up in a story bigger than them made of anonymous letters, undercover agents, old dossiers and experimental research on subatomic particles that connect the disappearance of Professor Colombo to a dark past: Rome, the 1930s, via Panisperna, Enrico Fermi's laboratory and Ettore Majorana. Everything seems to revolve around Majorana. What if he wasn't dead and had been hiding for thirty years?

The elusive atom is a brilliant thriller in constant balance between noir and the history of physics, scientific dissemination and mystery. An investigation in which, just as happens in the subatomic universe, opposing forces continually collide, risking triggering an explosion that could leave a long trail of deaths in its wake.