Book Review--Blue Twilight, by Jessica Speart

This book is part of another series upon which I have stumbled; it's what the Pittsburgh Post Gazette called a wildlife mystery thriller. Rachel Porter is an agent for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Recently assigned to Northern California, she receives a call from a professor specializing in endangered butterflies. First he tells her that someone was illegally netting butterflies and digging up plants in San Bruno MountainSate Park. Then he tells her that a biologist hired by Fish and Wildlife to search for a rare and possibly extinct butterfly has disappeared.

Rachel checks out the professor's tip about the illegal butterfly collector. When she finds the man, Mitch Aikens, she learns all about his business breeding and selling butterflies, including endangered ones, (before she tells him where she works) and decides to turn him into an informant who will help her catch some big-time butterfly dealers. She talks to her boss about the missing biologist, but he tells her it wasn't their division that hired him and thus not their problem. So Rachel decides to investigate on her own time. The investigation leads her to Mendocino and to Bill Trepler, a former director of conservation biology at a university who now has switched sides and hires himself out to private developers as a consultant. He tells her about the butterfly for which the missing biologist was searching--the Lotis Blue Butterfly, last seen in 1983 and possibly extinct. The missing biologist's car is found abandoned but provides no other clues, and the sheriff isn't terribly interested.

Then a teenage girl--the daughter of a friend of Rachel's--also goes missing. When Rachel--who apparently missed her calling as a private investigator as opposed to a Fish and Wildlife Agent--helps search for the girl, her case intertwines with that of the missing biologist and the world of butterfly collecting in a most bizarre way.

This book meanders quite a bit, but I still found it engaging. I wasn't sure how much I'd like it since I don't have a huge interest in wildlife (other than being generally pro-environmentalist). But actually, the environmental information was interesting. I learned that butterfly populations are rapidly decreasing due to habitat loss and poaching, and that butterflies are the most important pollinator of crops, after bees. Butterflies were even described in this book as a barometer for the health of the planet, rather like a canary in a mineshaft. Kind of scary when you consider their decreasing populations.