1994 mystery, second in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder mysteries
in US National Parks. In the Isle Royale park off the Michigan coast,
one of the dive operators turns up dead in a long-sunken shipwreck.
This is a book that gets off to a much quicker start than the
first, and manages to introduce us to the first victim before his
death. But Anna is also still feeling her way into the local
community, having only just transferred in, and she's having to sort
out her impressions of who might potentially be trustworthy at the
same time as trying to track down a murderer – when even reaching the
crime scene is a technical diving challenge.
(And as a scuba diver, though I've never done anything this extreme, I
didn't spot any technical errors in the diving sequences, one of which
forms the climax of the book.)
There are secondary mysteries too, as everyone seems to have a secret
and most of them might have been driven to murder to keep them, and
they'll all get revealed at least to Anna if not to the world. There's
rather less description of the unique location in this book, and
rather more of the people; which works, but it seems a bit of a waste
of the place. (Barr revisited it in 2008's Winter Study.)
This isn't a deep book, but it is a very twisty one. Followed by Ill
Wind.
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