2009 mystery, fifteenth in Barr's Anna Pigeon series, murder
mysteries in US National Parks. After the events of the last book,
Anna's on administrative leave; she travels with her husband to the
Rio Grande for a rafting trip. They come across a nearly-dead, very
pregnant woman; and apparently someone wants to finish the job.
This book calls back in some ways to the first, Track of the
Cat: once more Anna is in an uncomfortable mental place, but this
time the wilderness isn't going to do the trick of making her better.
On the other hand we finally see her spending some time with Paul
Davidson, her husband – at least until he's pushed off elsewhere so
that she has to deal with things all on her own as usual. Previous
stories have blended human and environmental threats (animals,
weather, etc.), but after one fine early sequence on the river the
problems here are entirely human, and that's a shame since it loses
one of the distinctive features of the series.
Things feel sloppy. There's confusion about east and west. One
character is given a different name for a single scene. People who've
been through a challenging physical ordeal aren't shipped off to
hospital; they're just left to get on with recovering on their own.
Anna does something impressive and gory, and everyone else just stands
around and watches. (Yes, they're physically exhausted, but even so.)
Anna falls for a trick she's fallen for before in this series, and she
really should have learned from the last time that happened. The idea
that pregnant Mexican women try to cross the border to get birthright
citizenship for their children, or that Anna has experienced a sudden
change of feeling as a result of being landed with a particular
responsibility, is repeated again and again.
This is a book that suffers from its form: because it's a mystery, we
know that the villain will turn out to be someone we've met rather
than a character introduced at the last moment. From among that
limited set of people, it rapidly becomes obvious just where blame
will have to lie, and a character will have to be bent thoroughly out
of shape to make it work. There's a dual narrative viewpoint, the
other from the chief of security for the mayor of Houston, who's there
for a political event; my feeling is that by book 15 in a series your
readers probably like your primary character and want to spend time
with her, not hear about this other guy. (It also gives the reader
information not available to Anna, which feels like cheating.)
It's, well, OK, I guess. But lots of books are better than OK. After
the number of recent books that haven't really made the grade, I feel
no particular desire to continue with this series. Followed by Burn.
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