Anna Pigeon Books In Order

Track of the Cat

A stunning mystery set against the high country trails of the Guadalupe Mountains of West Texas, where the age old battle of man against nature is fought with a frightening twist. Anna Pigeon has fled New York and her memories to find work as a ranger in the country’s national parks. In the remote backcountry of West Texas, however, she discovers murder and violence. Fellow park ranger Sheila Drury is mysteriously killed, presumably by a mountain lion. But the deep claw marks Anna finds across Drury’s throat and the paw prints surrounding the body are too perfect to be real. Suspicious from the start and eager to prevent the needless slaughter of her beloved cougars, Anna can’t let the matter rest. The disappearance of another ranger and the frightening reality of a hiking ‘accident’ of her own convince Anna that something is very wrong. Following a trail with few leads, Anna must confront the dark side of the desert. As she comes closer to the truth, she realizes that whatever is stalking the land she loves is now stalking her as well. Atmospheric, evocative, and rich in the mysterious secrets of the Southwestern wilderness, Track of the Cat marks the mystery debut of a superior writer.

A Superior Death

The inaccessible wreck, Kamloops, has rested at the bottom of Lake Superior for nearly seven decades, the bodies of its ill fated crew eerily preserved in the frigid waters. But now there is an extra corpse on board a newly slain interloper suspiciously dressed in 1920’s clothing. It is Anna Pigeon’s jobas a ranger with the U.S. National Park Service to help protect wild and lonely places from civilization’s corrupting touch. Now a bizarre mystery held firmly in a Great Lake’s icy grip is drawing Anna into a nightmare of greed adn cold blooded murder. And what she finds waiting beneath the surface could prove fatal.

Ill Wind

It is whispered that the Old Ones still hauntMesa Verde the restless spirits of the Anasazi, whocarved their homes in the mountain’s face eightcenturies ago…
and then disappeared from the Earth. Newly assigned national parks rangerAnna Pigeon seeks solace from her own personaldemons in the ancient cave dwellings of a vanished NativeAmerican civilization. But an inexplicable illness affectingvisitors to the popular Colorado landmark has dragged herfrom her reverie as have two mysterious tragedies: thedeath of a child…
and the murder of a friend. And now shemust find the very human source of the evil wind that isblowing through the ruins. For it threatens more innocentlives, Mother Nature…
and Anna herself.

Firestorm

As part of the army battling the Jackknife fire in northern California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park, Anna, in her capacity as spike camp medic and security officer, tends the injuries and the frayed nerves of the firefighters. When the National Weather Service predicts a cold front followed by snow, promising to all but extinguish the fire, the camp is demobilized, but a last minute rescue of a firefighter with a broken leg detains Anna and the San Juan crew. Driven on by the erratic thunderstorm of the front, wind shears in the steep canyon, creating the deadly weather conditions for a Firestorm. As the ravine explodes in flames propelled by the racing winds, the crew tries desperately to outrun the blaze, ultimately seeking refuge in their individual silver fire shelters wryly referred to as shake ‘n’ bakes. When the fire finally pas*ses, Anna emerges from her shelter to check on the fate of her companions. The sound of each exhausted voice, the sight of each bruised and blackened figure, is cause for celebration until one member of the crew is found inside his shelter with a knife in his back. With darkness comes snow, making immediate rescue impossible, and Anna must tend to the physical and emotional wounds of the crew while seeking the identity of the murderer in their midst.

Endangered Species

In the midst of a dangerously dry season, national park ranger Anna Pigeon has been posted to Cumberland Island off the Georgia coast for a monotonous, twenty one day fire watch. But her boredom is short lived, for this remote and marshy place is breeding ground for more than just the imperiled Loggerhead turtle; it also spawns eccentricity and secrets, greed, suspicion…
and murder.A small plane crashes into the palmetto thickets nearby. Anna and her crew arrive in time to control the blaze, but too late to save pilot and his passenger, Cumberland’s sole law enforcement ranger. When the cause of the ‘accident’ is determined to be sabotage, Anna becomes entangled in an investigation that threatens to upset the very delicate balance of this fragile ecological preserve. For she is precariously close to exposing dark, clandestine crimes both old and new that someone has worked very diligently to conceal…
and which make Anna Pigeon the most endangered creature on the island.

Blind Descent

‘Hands down, Anna Pigeon is the most complex protagonist in crime fiction,’ proclaimed the Philadelphia Inquirer of the hero*ine of last year’s Endangered Species. ‘Barr possesses that rare combination of talents: she can write a beautiful sentence and she can create a first rate mystery,’ said Publishers Weekly. In Blind Descent, Anna Pigeon faces personal demons as well as life threatening dangers in an untamed underground wilderness for which neither training nor her love of the outdoors has prepared her. Lechuguilla Cavern is a man eating cave discovered in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park in the mid 1980s. Estimated to extend for more than three hundred miles, only ninety of them mapped, the cave was formed by acid burning away the limestone; corridors, pits, cramped wormholes, cliffs and splendid rooms the size of football fields tangle together in a maze shrouded in the utter darkness of the underground. When a fellow ranger is injured in a caving accident, Anna swallows her paralyzing fear of small spaces and descends into Lechuguilla to help a friend in need. Worse than the claustrophobia that haunts her are the signs some natural, and some, more ominously, man made that not everyone is destined to emerge from this wondrous living tomb. All the skills Anna has honed in the terrestrial world are called into play on precipitous climbs, exhausting treks, and descents into canyons that have never seen the sun. The terrain is alien and hostile, the greed and destructive powers of mankind all too familiar. In this place of internal terrors, Anna must learn whom she can trust, and, in the end, decide who is to live and who is to die.

Liberty Falling

There is peril beneath the watchful eyes of the Lady…
When Anna Pigeon left New York City after her husband was killed, she hoped it would be forever. But now her sister Molly is clinging to life in an uptown hospital ICU, so Anna has reluctantly returned. Rooming with a friend and fellow park ranger in close quarters on Liberty Island the small strip of land that is home to Lady Liberty Anna spends her free time exploring the grand monument and the crumbling, overgrown, and eerie ruins in the unrestored sections of nearby Ellis Island. But the peace she seeks here is shattered when she finds herself among a crowd gathered at the Lady’s base, staring at the broken body of a teenager who fell or was pushed to her death. The reason behind the youthful girl’s fatal plunge is not the only mystery alive on these historic sites nor will hers be the only death. Hidden in a dangerous labyrinth of stone, glass, and steel are secrets Anna Pigeon is now compelled to uncover…
and an insidious threat to herself and to others that could wreak havoc on a nation’s proudest day. There is peril beneath the watchful eyes of the Lady…
There is peril beneath the watchful eyes of the Lady…
When Anna Pigeon left New York City after her husband was killed, she hoped it would be forever. But now her sister Molly is clinging to life in an uptown hospital ICU, so Anna has reluctantly returned. Rooming with a friend and fellow park ranger in close quarters on Liberty Island the small strip of land that is home to Lady Liberty Anna spends her free time exploring the grand monument and the crumbling, overgrown, and eerie ruins in the unrestored sections of nearby Ellis Island. But the peace she seeks here is shattered when she finds herself among a crowd gathered at the Lady’s base, staring at the broken body of a teenager who fell or was pushed to her death. The reason behind the youthful girl’s fatal plunge is not the only mystery alive on these historic sites nor will hers be the only death. Hidden in a dangerous labyrinth of stone, glass, and steel are secrets Anna Pigeon is now compelled to uncover…
and an insidious threat to herself and to others that could wreak havoc on a nation’s proudest day.

Deep South

Park Ranger Anna Pigeon stumbles upon a gruesome murder with frightening racial overtones in the latest installment of the bestselling series.’What lifts the Anna Pigeon novels far above most of the other contemporary amateur sleuth mysteries is Barr’s exquisite writing it swoops, it soars, sails then catches you unawares beneath the heart and takes your breath away,’ proclaimed the Cleveland Plain Dealer of last year’s Liberty Falling. In Deep South, Nevada Barr takes our breath away once again as her hero*ine travels cross country to Mississippi, only to encounter terrible secrets in the heart of the south. The handwritten sign on the tree said it all: REPENT. For Anna Pigeon, this should have been reason enough to turn back for her beloved Mesa Verde. Instead she heads for the Natchez Trace Parkway and the promotion that awaits her. Almost immediately, she finds herself in the midst of controversy: as the new district ranger, she faces resentment so extreme her ability to do her job may be compromised, and her life may very well be in danger. But all thoughts of personal safety are set aside with the discovery of a young girl’s body in a country cemetery, a sheet around her head, a noose around her neck. The kudzu is thick and green, the woods dark and full of secrets. And the ghosts of violence hover as Anna struggles for answers to questions that, perhaps, should never be asked. Deep South proves that, ‘like the parks and monuments she writes of, Nevada Barr should be declared a national treasure’ The Bloomsbury Review.

Blood Lure

The laws of nature take a terrifyingly murderous turn in this spellbinding addition to the New York Times bestselling series featuring Park Ranger Anna Pigeon. In Blood Lure, Anna returns to the West, where she is sent on a training assignment to study the 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. Along with bear researcher Joan Rand and a volatile and unpredictable teenaged boy, Anna hikes the backcountry, seeking signs of the bears. On their second night out, the tables are turned: one of the beasts comes looking for her. Daybreak finds the boy missing and a camper dead, her neck snapped by a single blow, the flesh of her face cut away with a knife. Feeling betrayed by both nature and humanity, Anna must find the beast stalking the trails leading her readers deep into a gripping wilderness life or death mystery. Nevada Barr takes readers on a journey like no other. With Blood Lure, she proves once again that she ‘has enough story telling ability to power a dozen different series’ The Denver Post.

Hunting Season

‘Readers familiar with Barr’s entertaining national park mystery series know that Anna rarely finds tranquility in God’s country. Her fans can only be grateful that there are still plenty of national parks left for Anna Pigeon to visit.’ People 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. It seems the deceased is the brother of Raymond Barnette, local undertaker and a candidate for sheriff, who wants to keep any hint of kinkiness out of the minds of the God fearing populace. Ray may be hiding a house full of secrets in the old family homestead, but before Anna can start her investigation, she’s waylaid by malevolent poachers, peevish coworkers, and a suddenly turbulent romantic life. And when hidden agendas and old allegiances are revealed, it’s suddenly Anna’s life that’s on the line. Tightly plotted, brilliantly suspenseful, and beautifully written, Hunting Season offers solid evidence that mankind can be as unpredictable and dangerous as the great outdoors.

Flashback

Running from a proposal of marriage from Sheriff Paul Davidson, Anna Pigeon takes a post as a temporary supervisory ranger on remote Garden Key in Dry Tortugas National Park, a small grouping of tiny islands in a natural harbor seventy miles off Key West. This island paradise has secrets it would keep; not just in the present, but in shadows from its gritty past, when it served as a prison for the Lincoln conspirators during and after the Civil War.

Here, on this last lick of the United States, in a giant crumbling fortress, Anna has little company except for the occasional sunburned tourist or unruly shrimper. When her sister, Molly, sends her a packet of letters from a great great aunt who lived at the fort with her husband, a career soldier, Anna’s fantasy life is filled with visions of this long ago time.

When a mysterious boat explosion and the discovery of unidentifiable body parts keeps her anchored to the present, Anna 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.

High Country

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. Needing an out of park ranger to work undercover, Anna is detailed to dining room duty; but after a week of waiting tables, she knows the missing employees are only the first indications of a sickness threatening the park. Her twenty something roommates give up their party girl ways and panic; her new restaurant colleagues regard her with suspicion and fear. But when Anna s life is threatened and her temporary supervisor turns a deaf ear, she follows the scent of evil, taking a solo hike up a snowy trial to the High Country, seeking answers. What waits for her is a nightmare of death and greed and perhaps her final adventure. ‘Barr s trademark pleasures are evocative natural descriptions, mounting suspense, and Anna Pigeon s never say die spirit.’ Kirkus Reviews

Hard Truth

Just three days after her wedding to Sheriff Paul Davidson, Anna Pigeon moves from Mississippi to Colorado to assume her new post as district ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park, where three young girls have disappeared during a religious retreat. Two of the children emerge a month later, clad only in filthy underwear and claiming to remember nothing of the intervening weeks. The girls are traumatized but forge a bond with the pair of campers who discovered them a wheelchair bound paraplegic and her elderly aunt.

With the reappearance of the children comes an odd and unsettling presence in the park, a sense of disembodied evil and unspeakable terror: small animals are mercilessly slaughtered and a sinister force seems to still control the girls. As Anna investigates, she finds herself caught up in the machinations of a paranoid religious sect determined to keep their secrets and the girls sequestered from law enforcement and psychiatric help.

Following the trails of the many suspects, especially that of the cult’s intense youth group leader, Anna discovers the force which has destroyed the children’s minds. Here in the park, evil has the eyes of a visionary and the soul of the devil. Anna will discover the truth even if it kills her.

Winter Study

Anna Pigeon returns in the remarkable new novel from the New York Times bestselling writer.

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 their own pack of the magnificent, much maligned animals. She’s housed in the island s bunkhouse with the famed wolf study team, along with two scientists from Homeland Security, who are as*sessing the study with an eye to opening the park each winter effectively bringing an end to the fifty year study so that it can be manned to secure the scrap of border with Canada.

Soon after Anna s arrival, the wolf packs under observation begin to act in peculiar ways. Giant wolf prints are found, and Anna spies the form of a great wolf from a surveillance plane. The discovery of wolf scat containing alien DNA leads the team to believe that perhaps a wolf/dog hybrid has been introduced to the island. When a female member of the team is savaged, Anna is convinced she is being stalked, and what was once a beautiful, idyllic refuge becomes a place of unnatural occurrences and danger beyond the ordinary. Alone on an island without electricity or running water, with temperatures hovering around zero both day and night, Anna fights not only for the wolves, but for also her own survival.

Filled with the nail biting suspense, richly drawn characters and gorgeous nature writing that are her hallmarks, Winter Study is vintage Barr, proving once again that she s a real writer, in every sense of the word The Denver Post.

Borderline

New York Times bestselling author Nevada Barr delivers another extraordinary Anna Pigeon novel set in the wide open vistas of southwestern Texas.

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. The one bright spot in Anna’s life is Paul, her husband of less than a year. Hoping the warmth and the adventure of a raft trip in Big Bend National Park will lift her spirits, Paul takes Anna to southwest Texas, where the sun is hot and the Rio Grande is running high. The sheer beauty of the Chihuahuan Desert and the power of the river work their magic until the raft is lost in the rapids and a young college student falls overboard, resulting in an even more grisly discovery. Caught in a strainer between two boulders and more dead than alive, is a pregnant woman, hair and arms tangled in the downed branches. Instead of the soul soothing experience they’d longed for, Anna and Paul find themselves sucked into a labyrinth of intrigue that leads from the Mexican desert to the steps of the Governor’s Mansion in Austin, Texas.

Burn

It’s true what they say: Money changes everything. And in Linda Howard s red hot novel Burn, the changes come fast, furious, and filled with the kind of sexy suspense, heart stopping romance, beautiful people, and risky business guaranteed to give you the most bang for your buck. Money certainly changes Jenner Redwine s life when she wins a lottery jackpot. But it also costs her plenty: Her father rips her off and disappears, her fortune hunting boyfriend soon becomes her ex, and friends turned freeloaders give her the cold shoulder when she stops paying for everything. Flush with new money, Jenner can t imagine ever finding a place in the world of the wealthy. Seven years later, though, she s rubbing elbows with the rich, despite the fact she still feels like a party crasher. Luckily she finds an ally and a guide to the rarefied realm of privilege in shy, kind hearted heiress Sydney Hazlett, who quickly becomes Jenner s confidante and surrogate sister. When Sydney invites Jenner on a charity cruise aboard a luxury liner, Jenner reluctantly agrees. But while she s expecting and dreading two weeks of masquerade balls, art auctions, and preening glitterati, what she gets is more like a Hitchcock movie than a Love Boat episode. Taken hostage by a menacing stranger, Jenner must cooperate in a mysterious cloak and dagger scheme or else. With nowhere to run, and with Sydney s life as well as her own at risk, Jenner is drawn into a game of dizzying intrigue and harrowing danger. But as her panic gives way to exhilaration, and fear of her captor turns to fascination, Jenner rediscovers feelings she hasn t had in years and realizes she s found a life worth living. If she survives.

The Rope

Anna Pigeon’s first case this is the story her fans have been clamoring for…
this is where it all starts. In The Rope, the latest in Nevada Barr’s bestselling novels featuring Anna Pigeon, Nevada Barr gathers together the many strings of Anna s past and finally reveals the story that her many fans have been long asking for. In 1995 and 35 years old, fresh off the bus from New York City and nursing a broken heart, Anna Pigeon takes a decidedly unglamorous job as a seasonal employee of the Glen Canyon National Recreational Area. On her day off, Anna goes hiking into the park never to return. Her co workers think she s simply moved on her cabin is cleaned out and her things gone. But Anna herself wakes up, trapped at the bottom of a dry natural well, naked, without supplies and no clear memory of how she found herself in this situation. As she slowly pieces together her memory, it soon becomes clear that someone has trapped her there, in an inescapable prison, and no one knows that she is even missing. Plunged into a landscape and a plot she is unfit and untrained to handle, Anna Pigeon must muster the courage, determination and will to live that she didn t even know she still possessed to survive, outwit and triumph. For those legions of readers who have been entranced over the years by Park Ranger Anna Pigeon s strength and determination and those who are new to Nevada Barr s captivating, compelling novels, this is where it all starts.