Such Quiet Girls by Noelle W. Ihli
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Two miscreants with a get rich quick plan kidnap a busload of children and hold them for ransom. The children and their bus driver are imprisoned in a buried container that had been fitted out with water, a makeshift toilet, and some mattresses. One resourceful 12-year-old girl, the tallest in the group, becomes a lead character as does her mother, who has access to school funds and who receives the ransom note. The story is full of suspense and clever ideas. It is inspired by, although not completely true to, an actual kidnapping that occurred in Chowchilla, California in 1976. I remember that kidnapping well, or at least the news coverage of it, as I was in the FBI at the time, stationed only two hours drive away, but I did not have any direct involvement because I was in language school, not on an investigative squad. I was involved in three other kidnappings in my career, only two of which resulted in the survival of the victims. Perhaps it was because of that experience and memory that I found this book more chilling than the writing alone might have been. For me it was a page-turner.

There are two or three other books with this title, so be sure you get the right one.

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If you’re not familiar with What3words, search that term or W3W in the little search box above. I enjoy commenting on the news from time to time by finding W3W combos that seem to apply to items in the news. Today I’ve done that with the arch President Trump is proposing to build in the Memorial Circle between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. It’s quite a large grassy circle (the proposed arch is over 250 feet wide) so there are hundreds of W3W combos there. I haven’t had time to examine them all, but here are a few that seem to apply:

ocean.voter.scam
giant.single.stick
tunnel.cult.logic
system.thing.cult

Approaching a different way and looking for the locations of appropriate terms, I found:

trumps.huge.arch – near Vladivostok, Russia
trumps.vanity.project – near Irkutsk, Russia
huge.imperial.arch – in Antarctica

All of these locations seem more appropriate to me. Funny how often the word cult shows up in MAGA-related sites. Have a nice day.

This Might Hurt by Stephanie Wrobel
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I can’t believe I finished this piece of garbage. The story is an intermixed tale of two pairs of sisters, in each case and older one and younger one. Some names are given, but for one pair, the names are not clear because one of them is narrating those chapters, referring to herself only as I, and the other sister is referred to by a nickname that we know is not her real one. Thus it is possible the two sets are the same women but at different stages of life. I suppose this was intended to add an element of suspense, but all it does is irritate and confuse the reader. The two sets do eventually connect, but it takes way too long to get there. There’s lots of meaningless filler before that. The rest of the book is pretty much just descriptions of sadistic behavior, either physical or psychological torture, something the author seems to relish. All the characters are either sadists or idiots and the plot is ridiculous and unbelievable. I think it’s the lowest rating on Goodreads of any book I’ve ever read and I’ve read a lot. I grabbed this off the new book shelf at my local library and it’s a lesson in why one should always read reviews and descriptions first.

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Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History by Giles Milton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The book chronicles the history of the Banda Islands in what is now Indonesia. The author has done an admirable amount of research of the voyages of various ship captains of both the Dutch and English, two countries that were fighting over the East Indies spice trade in the 16th and 17th centuries. It’s shocking how much violence there was between the two countries and between the Dutch and the natives. Slaughter is an understatement and torture and slavery were rampant. Control of the islands, and Run in particular, shifted back and forth several times. The last Englishman to have control of it before its ultimate disposition by treaty was a man named Nathaniel Courthope, the eponym of the book. The bravery of the sailors and tradesmen of the day is incredible today since most of them ended up dying of scurvy, disease, or violence. Life (and death) was quite literally cheap. I found the accounts fascinating, although I must say they became rather repetitive in nature. I liked the liberal quoting of the captains and others using what seems archaic English now. There are many hints throughout the book that the island of Run was later to play a very big and unexpected part in history, but that part is not revealed until the very end. I don’t fully accept the idea that Run was as instrumental as the author makes it out to be, nor do I find Courthope to be the transformational figure he is made out to be.

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