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Summary
Summary
Nevada Barr brings her acclaimed New York Times bestselling Anna Pigeon series to Minotaur Books with one of her most compelling, complex novels yet! 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. She discovers what seems to be an attempt to place a curse on her--a gruesomely killed pigeon marked with runic symbols; and begins to slowly find traces of very dark doings in the heart of post-Katrina New Orleans. Tied up in all of this is Jordan, who is not at all what he appears to be; a fugitive mother accused of killing her husband and daughters in a fire; and faint whispers of unpleasant goings-on in the heart of the slowly recovering city.Now it will take all of Anna's skills learned in the untamed outdoors to navigate the urban jungle in which she finds herself, to uncover the threads that connect these seemingly disparate people, and to rescue the most vulnerable of creatures from the most savage of animals.
Author Notes
Nevada Barr was born on March 1, 1952. She is the author of a series of mysteries involving national parks. She draws on her own experience as a National Park Service ranger to thrill readers with the majesty of nature. Anna Pigeon, the heroine of such novels as A Superior Death and Endangered Species, is a rough-and-tough ranger who left the wilds of New York for the great outdoors, and is modeled after Barr.
Barr began writing in 1978, garnering national attention with the publication in 1993 of Track of the Cat, which won both the Agatha and Anthony awards for Best First Mystery Novel. Her novels are known for breathtaking descriptions of nature, diverse settings, and a no-nonsense heroine. She also provides frequently unflattering portrayals of the National Park Service.
Her works include 13 1/2, Winterstudy, Borderline, Burn, The Rope and Destroyer Angel.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Barr's outstanding 16th Anna Pigeon novel (after Borderline) takes the National Park Service ranger to the urban wilderness of post-Katrina New Orleans, where the Jazz National Heritage Park preserves the Big Easy's music. Anna comes to believe that a creepy neighbor, Jordan, one of the "gutter punks" who roam the city, is a pedophile. But Jordan turns out to have another side, and his link with Clare Sullivan, a Seattle actress whose family was murdered in a fire Clare is suspected of setting, is a linchpin of Barr's skillful plot. Anna vividly maneuvers the luridÅcity jungle, from a Bourbon Street strip joint, where the women have formed a family, to a brothel specializing in children. Anna also learns that appearances can deceive even the most insightful of rangers. Anna's complex personality continues to elevate the series, and the ranger's sojourn to New Orleans further energizes this always reliable series. 150,000 first printing. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
National Park Service Ranger Anna Pigeon works her 16th case in the most unparklike setting imaginable.Minutes after Seattle actress Clare Sullivan awakens to find her house emptyno dog, no husband, no daughtersthe building erupts in a flaming explosion. In the aftermath of the destruction, there's even worse news: One of the officers who responded to Clare's 911 call finds the charred bodies of her two girls, Dana and Victoria, dead in their beds, right where Clare had reported they weren't. Driven equally by a single clue, an overheard fragment of a cell-phone call about the "Bourbon Street nursery," and the certainty that the police will arrest her for the murders of her family members, Clare goes AWOL, hoping against hope to find Dana and Vee alive. Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, Anna Pigeon (Hard Truth, 2005, etc.), who has been forced to take a leave of absence from her job on account of her Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, spends the time visiting her friend Geneva Akers, a blind blues singer who performs at New Orleans' Jazz National Historical Park, only a stone's throw from Bourbon Street. It's only a matter of time before Anna's story intersects with Clare's, and the moment of collision halfway through is the most successful surprise here. The sequel is all heartrending accounts of kidnapped and abused children, luridly detailed adventures among the Big Easy's demimondaine, and a climactic assault on a pedophile brothelsturdy stuff, every bit of it, but nothing that plays to Barr's unmatched gift for linking Anna's inner turmoil to the great outdoors.An intense but conventional actioner whose two heroines aren't nearly as compelling as Anna's solo turns.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In her new novel, the wildly popular Barr takes her crime-solver, park ranger Anna Pigeon, out of her element. Previous installments in the series have found Anna moving from one national park to another, solving the crimes that seem to follow her from place to place, but this time she is in New Orleans, staying with a friend, when, believe it or not, somebody tries to put a hex on her. Anna soon suspects that her friend's tenant, an abundantly off-putting fellow named Jordan, might have something to do with it but why? This is not the first time the author has taken Anna out of her usual rustic settings (1999's Liberty Falling, for instance, is set in New York), but regular readers need not worry: Barr isn't merely rehashing big-city themes she's tackled before. There's a reason why this story needs to be set in the Big Easy, and Barr develops the narrative carefully, never letting the eerie black-magic elements overshadow her solid and suspenseful plotting. A definite winner.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Anna Pigeon, the stalwart National Park Service ranger in Nevada Barr's rugged wilderness novels, has been feeling her age lately (she was "coming up on 50" six years ago in "High Country"), and she's giving serious thought to a job change. BURN (Minotaur, $25.99) might be considered a step in that direction, since it takes place mostly in the French Quarter of New Orleans and restricts its animal studies to acts of cruelty committed by bipeds who consider themselves human. This uncharacteristically urban novel may not present Anna with any endangered species to protect or environmental threats to ward off, but it does give her a chance to prove that her outdoor skills are adaptable to city streets. The harrowing plot, which concerns the organized sex traffic in young children, also provides Barr with an opportunity to sharpen her characters. Although she travels the pedestrian tourist route in New Orleans and makes little effort to capture the rhythms and inflections of regional speech, Barr doesn't judge the locals by the colorful personalities they wear like carnival masks. The bartenders, strippers, street musicians and voodoo-shop proprietors Anna meets during her search for a young punk she suspects of being a pedophile are well observed and closely analyzed. And her portrayal of Clare Sullivan, wanted on four counts of murder for killing her husband, their two children and his mistress and burning down the family home in Seattle, is as complex as it is sympathetic. By the time Clare and Anna join forces to infiltrate a brothel that trades in children, Barr is writing with the kind of ferocity she usually saves for her backcountry adventures. Although finding work in a city can be tricky for someone like Anna, who admits that violence to animals saddens her "on a level violence to humans did not " Barr slides past the problem by depicting children, in their innocence, as a higher form of animal, And while she can't knock a few years off Anna's age, she gives her the right attitude about aging. Being old is a point of pride, Anna tells herself, because "I am old and mean and on the side of the angels." Colin Cotterill makes it very clear that "there was nothing inherently funny about the People's Democratic Republic of Laos in the 1970s," and offers plenty of evidence in LOVE SONGS FROM A SHALLOW GRAVE (Soho, $25). But Dr. Siri Paiboun, the nation's official (and only) coroner, is determined to see the humor in his diminished life, finding it bubbling up unexpectedly when he goes to the movies to see a piece of Chinese propaganda called "The Train From the Xiang Wu Irrigation Plant" or when he reflects on the giant billboards urging everyone to breed pigs. Just sitting in the rain at a tobacco and alcohol stall, swapping snide comments with a friend on past and present regimes, is an occasion for mirth. To further engage his quick mind, Siri is sometimes given a puzzle to solve, like the murders of three young women, each killed by a thrust through the heart from an épée, a weapon that 99.9 percent of the Laotian population has never heard of. It's also standard procedure in this series for Cotterill to step back from the case at hand and dispatch Siri on a field trip to some other Communist garden spot in Southeast Asia. This time, he's sent on a diplomatic mission to Cambodia that yields rich evidence of crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh. And no, it's not the least bit funny. As any well-read child knows, German folk tales are scarier than their sanitized English versions, a quality shrewdly acknowledged by Helen Grant in ber first novel, THE VANISHING OF KATHARINA LINDEN (Delacorte, $24). Set in the small German town of Bad Münstereifel during a cold, dreary winter when little girls seem to be disappearing left and right, this dark story gains immeasurably from Grant's choice of narrator: Pia Kolvenbach, who is socially ostracized (shunned as "the Potentially Explosive Schoolgirl") after her grandmother dies in a bizarre accident. Feeling even more isolated when her English mother and German father begin quarreling, Pia finds companionship with "StinkStefan," "the most unpopular boy in the class," and Herr Schiller, a kindly old gent who spins terrifying but oddly comforting horror stories. Although thin on plot, the novel has nice atmosphere and takes a tender view of lonely children trying to make sense of a grown-up world. Life is just one crazy chore after another for an obsessive-compulsive wreck like Milo Slade. A sweet-tempered nurse whose specialty is caring for homebound geriatrics, he's the hero of Matthew Dicks's offbeat novel, UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO (Broadway, paper, $14.99). When Milo isn't able to make it to a bowling alley where he can bowl a strike or to a karaoke bar to sing "99 Luftballons" in German, he'll dip into his emergency stash of grape jelly jars and get some fast relief by popping their pressure caps. But keeping his increasingly irrational needs a secret from his wife has put such a strain on their marriage that Milo is currently living on his own. The chance discovery of a video camera and a set of confessional tapes made by a woman who has long held herself responsible for the disappearance and probable death of a childhood friend inspires Milo to put his O.C.D. to better use by tracking down the lost friend. The methodical ways he has adopted in pursuit of his weird impulses make Milo a good detective. And if he should find a bit of happiness on his quixotic quest, doesn't the poor guy have it coming? In her latest mystery, Nevada Barr relocates Anna Pigeon, her Park Service heroine, to the streets of New Orleans.
Library Journal Review
Our favorite park ranger is back. On administrative leave after her adventures in Texas's Big Bend National Park (Borderline), Anna Pigeon visits a friend who works at the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park. Soon Anna is involved with a mysterious character named Jordan who is not what he appears to be. Their hunt for two missing children leads them into the seedy underworld of sex trafficking and corrupt politicians. As always, Anna is in the thick of things, but her years of law enforcement training and work in the great outdoor parks do not fully prepare her for the wilderness of the urban scene and its inhabitants. Nonetheless, Anna prevails. Unlike in other Barr novels, the park plays a very minor role, but the excitement reigns with a multilayered story, nonstop action, and attention-grabbing characters. VERDICT Making her Minotaur debut, Barr has written another hit. Her fans will devour this. [Seee Prepub Mystery, LJ 4/1/10; 150,000-copy first printing; library marketing campaign.]-Patricia Ann Owens, Illinois Eastern Community Colls., Mt. Carmel, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.