Showing results by author "Nevada Barr" in All Categories

Anna has been assigned a three-week posting on Georgia's isolated Cumberland Island. Despite the breathtaking natural setting, Anna finds time weighing heavily as she works tedious fire pre-suppression duty. Her boring routine is shattered when a sudden plane crash in the inland palmetto thickets calls her and the other members of the fire crew to action. When Anna and the crew investigate, they discover the plane was sabotaged. Suspicions smolder over the accident which killed both the pilot and his passenger, Cumberland's lone law enforcement ranger.

Anna Pigeon has been a ranger with the National Park Service for many years, but she had a very different life before tragedy sent her west seeking something new. Now Nevada Barr finally tells the previously untold story of Anna’s first foray into the wild, and the case that helped shape her into the ranger she became. Thirty-five years old, fresh off the bus from New York City, and nursing a shattered heart, Anna Pigeon takes a decidedly unglamorous job....

Anna Pigeon, a Ranger with the National Park Service, is newly married but on administrative leave from her job as she recovers from the traumas of the past couple of months. While the physical wounds have healed, the emotional ones are still healing. With her new husband back at work, Anna decides to go and stay with an old friend from the Park Service, Geneva, who works as a singer at the New Orleans Jazz NHP. She isn't in town long before she crosses paths with a tenant of Geneva's, a creepy guy named Jordan.

It's fall in the Sierra Mountains, and Anna Pigeon is slinging hash in Yosemite National Park's historic Ahwahnee Hotel. Four young people, all seasonal park employees, have disappeared, and two weeks of work by crack search-and-rescue teams have failed to turn up a single clue; investigators are unsure as to whether the four went AWOL for reasons of their own - or died in the park.

Haunted by personal demons and cut off from her friends and family, Anna Pigeon seeks solace in the quiet ruins of Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park. But the solitude is soon interrupted. A mysterious illness is afflicting tourists to the park. When an asthmatic child dies and a ranger colleague - and friend - is murdered, Anna must find out the truth.

When Anna answers a call to historic Mt. Locust, once a producing plantation and inn on Mississippi's Natchez Trace Parkway and now a tourist spot, the last thing she expects to encounter is murder. But the man Anna finds in the stand's old bedroom is no tourist in distress. He's nearly naked, and very dead, his body bearing marks consistent with an S & M ritual gone awry. On a writing table nearby is an open Bible, ominous passages circled in red.

In Jackson Square in the French Quarter a tarot card reader told Polly Deschamps she would be a success. Thirty years later, Polly is a respected professor of literature with good friends and her own home - a safe life for her and her two daughters. Butcher Boy, released on his 17th birthday, shook the snow from his boots and headed south. New Orleans, a Mecca for runaways then and now, offers sanctuary but never forgiveness.

When a mysterious boat explosion - and the discovery of unidentifiable body parts - keeps her anchored to the present, Anna Pigeon finds crimes of past and present closing in on her. A tangled web that was woven before she arrived begins to threaten her sanity and her life. Cut off from the mainland by miles of water, poor phone service, and sketchy radio contact, and aided by one law-enforcement ranger, Anna must find answers or weather a storm to rival the hurricanes for which the islands are famous.

Anna Pigeon moves from Mississippi to Colorado to assume her new post as district ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park, where three girls have disappeared during a religious retreat. Two of the children reappear a month later, clad only in filthy underwear and claiming to remember nothing of the intervening weeks. As Anna investigates, she finds herself caught up in the machinations of a paranoid religious sect bent on protecting their secrets.

It is January, and Park Ranger Anna Pigeon is sent to Isle Royale in Lake Superior to learn about managing and understanding wolves, as her home base of Rocky Mountain National Park might soon have its own pack of the magnificent, much-maligned animals. She's lodging in the island's bunkhouse with the famed wolf study team, along with two scientists from Homeland Security. Soon after Anna's arrival, the wolf packs under observation begin to behave in peculiar ways.

In Blood Lure, Anna returns to the West, where she is sent on a training assignment to study grizzly bears in Waterton/Glacier National Peace Park, straddling the border between Montana and Canada. But back in her beloved mountains, where the air is pure and cool, Anna fails to find the spiritual renewal she expected. Instead, nature seems to have become twisted, carrying a malevolence almost human in its focus.

The killings on Isle Royale have left Anna drained and haunted, her memories of her time with the wolf study group forever marred by the carnage on the island. Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, she is on administrative leave, per her superintendent's urging. Anna wonders if the leave might not be permanent, either by her own choice or that of the National Park Service.