Tenth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries in US National
Parks. Back on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi, a body's been
found in an old plantation house, left in a manner suggestive of
sexual homicide.
This is the first of the novels that's returned to a previous
location, and this is both good and bad. Earlier books have tended to
set the scene with lyrical descriptions of something that's new both
to Anna and to the reader, and there's rather less of that here.
What replaces it is, all too often, a grinding sense of the nastiness
of the South. Whether it's the deer-poaching good ol' boy hunters, the
local funeral home director angling for a position as sheriff, or the
long legacy of slavery, the sense of grime is inescapable. All right,
these haven't always been light books, but before now there's
generally been an air that grottiness is an exception rather than a
way of life. That the Parkway is basically a human construct doesn't
help, since there's rather less of the wilderness at which this series
excels.
There's misdirection, as there is in any mystery story, but this time
somewhat heavy-handed: when someone says "we know A, which might among
other things imply B" and someone else says "ah, B, well that must
mean C", we know we're being sent down a false trail. Everything does
fit together in the end, but I was slightly annoyed at being led to
the correct conclusion by the writing style rather than just by the
evidence; after all, knowledge that this is a mystery is information
not available to the in-story detective. It feels as though I wasn't
able to play fair.
But that wasn't enough to spoil my pleasure in the book. Nor was
Anna's trusting of a person she really shouldn't, with plenty of signs
to warn her off; she gets into a bad situation largely by blurting out
something she shouldn't over an open radio, and that seemed very out
of character for her. Yes, all right, she gets herself out of it, and
that's good.
There's a moderate amount of action, mostly spaced out among scenes of
detection and routine work which sometimes let the pace sag a little.
A scene on the road is particularly effective.
In terms of series continuity, there's still very little of Anna's
sister Molly, who's largely dropped out of the series since Liberty
Falling. We do get more of Anna's relationship with sheriff/priest
Paul Davidson, introduced in Deep South, and this develops in a
satisfying manner without distracting from the main story.
Followed by Flashback.
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