Review of "The New Mother: A Gripping Psychological Thriller" by Julia Crouch

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Rachel Rodrigues, called RR by her followers, has been a popular social media influencer for a decade. Rachel peddles exercise routines, athletic wear, bath products, beauty lotions, health foods, and so on - and even has yoga workouts and cookery videos on YouTube.









Rachel is in her late thirties though, and fears she's losing followers to young new internet stars. So Rachel decides to have a baby, so she can post the ongoing story of her pregnancy, delivery, and motherhood. Rachel hopes this will attract mothers-to-be to her social media sites and provide the opportunity to hawk prenatal and baby products.



Rachel and her best friend Fran, who've known each other for decades, plan Rachel's social media transition together. Since Rachel will need help with the baby, they advertise for a mother's helper. The successful applicant must have good references; sign a non-disclosure agreement; and agree to be photographed for Rachel's posts.



After interviewing applicants for three days, Fran favors a fit young woman with an outgoing personality. However, Rachel - who's always looking for stories for her Instagram - opts for a quiet out-of-shape candidate named Abbie James, who has overbleached hair and bad makeup. Rachel plans to 'fix' Abbie, and post about Abbie's step-by-step improvement, which she'll call Abbie's journey.



Abbie isn't the naïf she appears to be, however, and has an agenda of her own. Abbie considers herself Rachel's biggest fan, and lied and schemed to become Rachel's mother's helper. Now Abbie plans to insinuate herself so deeply into Rachel's life that she becomes indispensable. Thus Abbie is dismayed to learn that Rachel's posts don't reflect her real life, but are meticulously coordinated by a hairdresser, make-up artist, fashion consultant, photographer, and business manager.





Still, Abbie is thrilled with her lovely rooms in Rachel's country home.....



.....and Rachel is pleased to have company as she awaits the imminent birth of her baby.



This sanguine picture soon begins to crack, because both Rachel and Abbie have dark secrets. Rachel's troubles began with an incident two decades ago; and Abbie's problems stem from a terrible childhood in foster homes. Both women are damaged, with histories of substance abuse, and they struggle with their cravings.



The story is interspersed with Rachel's Instagram posts, mentioning the number of 'likes', the images, and the products being advertised. There are also frequent updates about Abby's journey, as she gets a makeover, works out, and becomes more fit.



These posts inevitably attract internet trolls, and Rachel is infuriated by the criticism.



The book starts to become ominous at this point, as Abbie becomes increasingly aggressive and manipulative and Rachel's pregnancy fugue clouds her mind. The novel now morphs into a thriller that heads for a dramatic denouement.

The audiobook is excellently narrated by Kirsty Dillon, who provides a unique voice for each character.

Thanks to Netgalley, Julia Crouch, and Bookouture for a copy of the book.

Rating: 3.5 stars

Review of "Three to Get Deadly: A Stephanie Plum Mystery" by Janet Evanovich

 

In this third book in the 'Stephanie Plum' series, the bounty hunter is looking for a beloved candy store owner. The book can be read as a standalone.



*****

When Trenton, New Jersey native Stephanie Plum lost her department store job, she became a bounty hunter for her cousin Vinnie. Stephanie's responsibility is to pick up bail skips (people who've missed their court dates) but she's notoriously inept at the job, and gets into all kinds of comical scrapes.

Stephanie's current assignment is to bring in popular candy store owner Mo Bedemier (known in the neighborhood as 'Uncle Mo'), who was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon.



Weapons aren't a big deal in Trenton - where almost everyone owns a gun - so Stephanie's puzzled when she can't find Mo anywhere. He hasn't even opened his candy shop for two days, which is unprecedented.

While Stephanie's looking for Mo she discovers the bodies of dead drug dealers all over Trenton, and is threatened by vigilantes who want her to leave Mo alone.



Stephanie refuses and her continuing search results in attacks by masked men; cars being wrecked; guns going off....all sorts of mayhem.



As Stephanie goes about her business she's either helped or hindered by her usual associates:

Lula - a big black woman who was once a 'ho' but is now a file clerk/bounty hunter in training; Lula wears kooky clothes, drives a red Firebird, and carries a huge gun. Lula can stop a perp by sitting on them, which is useful at times.



Ranger - a hot Cuban bounty hunter who taught Stephanie the trade (or at least tried to). Ranger is as tough as they come, and seems able to walk through locked doors. Ranger's trying to get Stephanie into shape, but she'd rather eat donuts than exercise.



Joe Morelli - a sexy Italian cop who's Stephanie's on-off boyfriend, and knows exactly when to show up for pizza and beer. Joe has an undercover operation going on, and wants Stephanie to stay away.



Also on hand are Stephanie's family:

Grandma Mazur - who likes guns, funerals, and men; her boyfriend in this story has bad dentures and a glass eye.



Stephanie's Mom - who 'takes a nip' when she's anxious; Stephanie's shenanigans inspire a lot of nips.



Stephanie's Dad - who watches TV, eats, and sighs at Stephanie's (and Grandma's) antics.



There are a lot of laughs in this cozy mystery, including Stephanie's inadvertent orange hair; Lula's bounty hunter outfit (a leather duster and cowboy hat); a corpse protruding from Lula's Firebird; and more. In my favorite comic scene, Stephanie is threatened by thugs in her apartment, and every middle-aged or elderly person on her floor comes to the rescue with a pistol, machine gun, meat cleaver, or metal walker.

Stephanie bumbles her way to locating Uncle Mo and discovering who killed the drug dealers, and I was surprised by the book's denouement - which is darker than I expected. Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable light mystery, recommended to fans of the genre.

Rating: 3 stars

Review of "Scientist E.O. Wilson: A Life in Nature" by Richard Rhodes

American historian and author Richard Rhodes wrote the award winning book 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' and later published 'Energy: A Human History.' Now Rhodes has branched out to biography again with this book about Edward Osborne Wilson (known as E.O. Wilson), a world-renowned American biologist, naturalist, and writer.

E.O. Wilson

Ever since I studied wasp taxonomy in graduate school, I've greatly admired the great ant taxonomist (among other things) E. O. Wilson. So I was happy to read this narrative about the famous scientist's life and work.


E.O. Wilson examining ants in the laboratory


E.O. Wilson observing ants in nature

For a deep dive into Wilson's scientific achievements, you'd have to read his books and articles. But if you just want to learn a bit about Wilson as a person - and get an overview of his contributions to science - this book, which is filled with fun personal details, is a good place to start.

E.O. Wilson, born in 1929, became interested in insects - especially ants - as a child. Despite being accidently blinded in one eye at age seven, Wilson was a seasoned researcher by his teens. Rhodes writes, "In a vacant lot in Mobile, Alabama, when Wilson was only 13 years old, he'd been the first collector in the United States to spot the invasion of the pestilential red imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, transported from Argentina as a ship stowaway." So the great biologist was off to a good start!


Solenopsis invicta (red fire ant)


Teenage Eagle Scout E.O. Wilson was well on his way to becoming a scientist

Later, in Wilson's second year as a junior fellow at Harvard in the early 1950s, the biologist was invited to collect ants in the South Pacific for the Harvard Museum. During Wilson's trip he discovered many new ant species, demonstrating he was both far-seeing and lucky. Wilson noted, "At the time I entered college only about a dozen scientists around the world were engaged full-time in the study of ants. I had struck gold before the rush began. Almost every research project I began thereafter, no matter how unsophisticated (and all were unsophisticated) yielded discoveries publishable in scientific journals."

Rhodes provides a detailed description of Wilson's South Pacific ant collecting trip, during which the scientist gathered at least 1,000 species. In addition, Rhodes enlivens the narrative with snippets from Wilson's letters to his fiancée Irene. For example, about arriving in Fiji, Wilson wrote, "Never before or afterward in my life have I felt such a surge of high expectation - of pure exhilaration - as in those few minutes. I carried no high-technology instruments, only a hand lens, forceps, specimen vials, notebooks, quinine, sulfanilamide, youth desire, and unbounded hope."


Fiji rain forest


Insect collecting kit

And from natives on Fiji, Wilson learned the island's historic cannibals thought "human flesh was salty, not as tasty as pig."


Staged photo of cannibal feast

When Christmas rolled around, Wilson was in New Caledonia (a French collective) and Santa Claus was supposed to arrive by French submarine, but could only muster an old tugboat. Santa was greeted anyway by a crowd of more than a thousand people, "including many children and fascinated New Caledonian natives and Indochinese and Malayans."


In some traditions, Santa Claus arrives by boat

Later, on the island of Espiritu Santo Wilson marveled at the rainforest, with giant trees, gorgeous little parrots and pigeons, and flying foxes (giant fruit-eating bats) - considered a delicacy. When Wilson later tried eating flying fox he found it "gamy, tasting just about what you'd expect from bat meat" and could only swallow a few bites.


Espiritu Santo rain forest


Flying fox (giant fruit bat)


Flying fox is a delicacy in the South Pacific

Afterwards, in Australia, Wilson marveled, "What a country! Hundreds and hundreds of miles of rough little roads and byways without a habitation along them or even an advertising sign now and then, just tens of thousands of square miles of eucalypt forest and sandplain.


Australian outback

From Australia Wilson headed to New Guinea, "one of the last and greatest strongholds of stone-age man and the primeval forest and my premier destination on this trip." Wilson told Irene he expected the fieldwork in New Guinea to be "the most exciting of my life." And indeed it was. Among the more than 50 species of ants collected in New Guinea, Wilson found species that lived in silk bags hung from trees and army ant colonies with hundreds of thousands of workers. On the downside, there were "endless, enormous, aggressive, consuming hordes of mosquitoes that are after you every minute of the day."






Some ants from New Guinea


Wilson was attacked by hordes of mosquitoes in New Guinea

After more stops, Wilson returned to America, and later noted, "Finally, clad in khaki and heavy boots, crew-cut, twenty pounds underweight, and tinted faint yellow from the antimalarial drug quinacrine, I fell into [my fiancée] Renee's arms."

As a biologist who'd seen diverse fauna everywhere, Wilson was interested in the evolution of animals. In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed that biological evolution occurs as a result of natural selection, which is the idea that in any given generation, some individuals - who are slightly better adapted - are more likely to survive and reproduce than others.



We now know that these 'better adaptations' are controlled by DNA (genes), whose structure was described by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953.


James Watson (left) and Francis Crick with their model of DNA

Wilson wanted to study the kinds of processes that create biodiversity, and much of his work involved field studies like those he did in the South Pacific. Ironically, this put Wilson at odds with his fellow Harvard professor, DNA describer James Watson, who believed biology could be best pursued in the lab.


James Watson

At one point, Wilson wrote, "I found [Watson] the most unpleasant human being I had ever met....At twenty-eight, he was only a year older. He arrived with a conviction that biology must be transformed into a science directed at molecules and cells and rewritten in the language of physics and chemistry...His bad manners were tolerated because of the greatness of the discovery he had made." Rhodes writes a good deal about the epic rivalry between Wilson and Watson, which resulted in the division of biological studies at Harvard into the separate departments of molecular biology and evolutionary biology.

SPOILER ALERT    SPOILER ALERT     SPOILER ALERT

Wilson and Watson later became friends.

END SPOILER ALERT     END SPOILER ALERT 

Rhodes describes Wilson's collaboration with other scientists and mathematicians; Wilson's studies of ant pheromones; Wilson's studies of populations and biogeography; Wilson's experiments related to repopulating denuded islands; Wilson's theories about altruistic behavior (sacrificing oneself so relatives with shared genes survive); Wilson's expansion into vertebrate biology; the brouhaha surrounding Wilson's publication of the book Sociobiology (this section is a humdinger!); Wilson's interest in hereditary influence on human behavior (also very controversial); Wilson's drive to catalogue ALL species on the planet; Wilson's efforts to conserve/restore natural habitats so species are protected; Wilson's books and other publications; and more.


Wilson's book Sociobiology resulted in backlash from some researchers

Perhaps appealing to human self-interest (if not love of nature), Wilson pleads for preserving species because, "Only a tiny fraction of species with potential economic importance has been used....A far larger number, tens of thousands of plants and millions of animals, have never even been studied well enough to assess their potential."



Wilson also developed theories about the evolution of social insects (like ants, bees and wasps) and describes some of their more dramatic behavior. Writing about the relentless sweep of Eciton burchelli (army ants) across a lowland forest in South America, Wilson wrote "they are a big conspicuous species that link themselves together around their mother queen in chains and nets that accumulate layer upon interlocking layer until finally the entire worker force - as many as 700,000 individuals - comprises a solid mass." Another ant specialist observed about an army ant horde, "For an Eciton burchelli raid nearing the height of its development in swarming, picture a rectangular body of 15 meters or more in width and 1 to 2 meters in depth, made of of many tens of thousands of scurrying reddish-black individuals....[which] bring disaster to practically all animal life that lies in their path and fails to escape."


Swarm of army ants

When Wilson retired from Harvard in 1996, he wanted to devote most of his time to his first love, the study of ants, and he continued to add to the field of myrmecology.


E.O. Wilson continued to study ants after retiring from Harvard


Ant collection

Wilson also continued his other work, and in 2014 the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory was opened in Mozambique. The facility offers long-term research and training in biodiversity documentation, ecology, and conservation biology to visiting researchers from both Mozambique and abroad.


E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory opens in Mozambique

Wilson has a good sense of humor as well. Asked "What do I do about the ants in my kitchen?" Wilson (half-seriously) replied, "Watch where you step. Be careful of the little lives. Feed them crumbs of coffeecake. They also like bit of tuna and whipped cream. Get a magnifying glass. Watch them closely. And you will be as close to any person may ever come to seeing social life as it might evolve on another planet."



In addition to being a great scientist, Wilson is a loving husband and father to his wife Irene and daughter Catherine. Now in his nineties, Wilson is still working and adding to his admirable legacy.


E.O. Wilson sitting in front of an anthill

I enjoyed the book and highly recommend it to readers interested in E.O. Wilson.

Thanks to Netgalley, Richard Rhodes, and Doubleday for a copy of the book.

Rating: 4 stars