2005 mystery, thirteenth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder
mysteries in US National Parks. In Rocky Mountain, three young girls
went missing a few months back, and were never found. But now two of
them have walked out of the woods…
It's interesting to see how Barr continues to try new things with
this series, rather than fall into a rut of another book just like the
last. Here we have a return to the dual-narrative style of
Flashback, but this time the secondary narrator is contemporary:
Heath Jarrod was an enthusiastic climber, until she took a bad fall
and broke her spine. Now she's coming to terms with life in a
wheelchair.
Not having gone through that process myself or known well anyone who
has, I can't say how well the portrayal succeeds. It's sometimes a bit
pat, as Heath finds something new to care about in place of the
climbing she can no longer do, but it still felt reasonably
plausible to me.
The two major strands, though, are two arms of the investigation of
the returned girls. On the one side, there's the question of what
happened to them, and where the third one is (and indeed whether she's
still alive); that's mostly Anna's investigation. On the other,
there's the question of what the two have gone back to, and whether
the "church group" they were part of was something more sinister:
that's Heath's side of the story.
The irreligious characters try hard to restrain their tendency to
think the worst of a dodgy-looking faith-based community, especially
when the local police department thinks they're just fine. This works
pretty well, and if the arc's progress is somewhat predictable at
least there's no pat answer to the problems that are inevitably
uncovered.
Meanwhile, Anna's dealing with a genuine psychopath, and this book is
probably the most gruesome of the series so far – going from tortured
animals to an extended climactic sequence as Anna goes up against the
murderer with nothing on her side but an eye to the main chance. This
book struck me as going much further into the human-horror side than
Barr has before, with the sort of glorying in details of nastiness
that I normally dislike intensely; Barr's writing continues to be
excellent, and that carried me over the worst of it, but it's not a
direction I like.
What really seems to be missing is reference to other books. I assume
that Barr's trying not to give away the plots of earlier stories to
readers who are starting the series here, but there are parallels
with her earlier cases, and it feels like a gap in the narrative when
she doesn't think of them.
For me this was a step down after High Country. Followed by Winter
Study.
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