Creator of Anna Pigeon, National Park Ranger

Born in Yerington, Nevada on March 1, 1952 and named for the state of her birth, Barr grew up in California. She began a career in theater but decided to become a park ranger. She created Anna Pigeon while working at Guadelupe National Park in Texas. Her first novel in the series Track of the Cat, is set in that park. So far, only two books, Deep South and Hunting Season, are set in the same park, the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi. Her next Anna Pigeon mystery, Winter Study, is set in Isle Royal National Park, also the setting for one of her earliest novels in the series, A Superior Death. Currently, Barr lives in New Orleans with her husband, four cats, and two dogs.

Clicking on the national park name below the book title will open a page for that park.

It is Anna Pigeon's job as 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 and cold-blooded murder. And what she finds waiting beneath the surface could prove fatal. - From the back cover of the paperback edition.

Ill Wind

Newly assigned national parks rander Anna Pigeon seeks solace from her own personal demons in the ancient cave dwellings of a vanished Native American civilization. But an inexplicable illness affecting visitors to the popular Colorado landmark has dragged her from her reverie - as have two mysterious tragedies: the death of a child...and the murder of a friend. And now she must find the very human source of the evil wind that is blowing through the ruins. For it threatens more innocent lives, Mother Nature...and Anna herself.

Firestorm

Ranger Anna Pigeon is among the exhausted firefighters, serving as medic and spike camp security, when an abrupt weather shift sends Jackknife racing relentlessly in their direction. And when the monstrous blaze has passed, Anna emerges from her protective shelter to discover two men are dead: one a victim of the hungry flames, the other stabbed through the heart. Now, trapped in a nightmarish landscape of snow and ash, cut off from rescue by a rampaging winter storm, Anna must investigate an inexplicable homicide - as she and nine others struggle to survive the terrible rage of nature...and the murderer in their midst. - From the back cover of the paperback edition.

Endangered Species

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 the 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 endancered creature on the island. - From the back cover of the paperback edition.

Liberty Falling
Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island National Monuments
When Anna's beloved sister Molly becomes gravely ill, Anna rushes to her bedside at New York's Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. What began as pneumonia has turned horrifyingly more complicated, and Anna, helpless, can do nothing except sit and watch.

To clear her mind, Anna bunks with friends on Liberty Island and finds soliture across the harbor in the majestically decayed remains of hospitals, medical wards, and staff quarters of Ellis Island. Unlike the magnificently restored Registry Hall, these buildings are slowly being reclaimed by nature: brick, glass, and iron are wrapped with delicate green tendrils, and walls disappear behind leafy curtains. When a tumble through a crumbling staircase temporarily halts her ramblings, Anna is willing to write off the episode as an accident. But then a young girl falls - or is pushed - to her death while exploring the Statue of Liberty. Park administrators are quick to point fingers, until one of their won meets a fate similar to the unidentified girl's. - From the dust jacket of the hardcover edition.

Blood Lure

Along with a bear researcher, Joan Rand, and a volatile and unpredictable teenage boy, Anna hikes the back country, seeking signs of the bears. On their second night out, the tables are turned: one of the beasts comes looking for them. Daybreak finds the boy missing and a camper dead, her neck snapped, the flesh of her face cut away. Feeling betrayed by nature and humanity, Anna must find the beast stalking the trails - and enter deep into a gripping wilderness life-or-death mystery. - From the dust jacket of the hardcover edition.

Hunting Season

But the man Anna finds in Mt. Locust's old bedroom is no tourist in distress. He's nearly naked, and very dead, his body bearing marks consistent with sex games gone awry. On a writing table nearby is an open Bible, ominous passages circled in red. - From the dust jacket of the hardcover edition.

Flashback

Fleeing personal problems, park ranger Anna Pigeon takes a temporary assignment in Dry Tortugas National Park, a grouping of tiny islands seventy miles off Key West - where threats from the distant past collide with danger in the here and now... - www.penguin.com

High Country

Her twenty-something roommates give up their party-girl ways and panic; her new restaurant colleagues regard her with suspicion and fear. Yet 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 trail to the high country, seeking answers. What awaits her is a nightmare of death and greed - and perhaps her final adventure. - From the dust jacket of the hardcover edition

Hard Truth
Rocky Mountain National Park
Hard Truth, at it's release, was hailed as Nevada's best to date by the critics, and acknowledged by devoted readers to be her scariest. In this adventure, Anna finds herself in a new job -- that of District Ranger in Rocky Mountain's National Park.. Paul Davidson, her long-time love, is a thousand miles away. Dropped into the middle of a mystery that has had the park in a state of turmoil for six weeks, she at first thinks it's solved itself...until the voices start ... voices without bodies ... until the small slayings turn into bigger, and even the most obtuse administrator must realize something is desperately wrong in the mountains. - From Nevada Barr's website

Winter Study
Isle Royal National Park
In her 14th outing, Anna Pigeon returns to Lake Superior to participate in the Winter Study, a 50-year research project on how wolves and moose interact (it's a real study, by the way). It's January, and Anna had spent years on Mississippi's Natchez Trace Parkway, where a denim jacket was considered winter gear. Homeland Security is looking at opening up Isle Royal National Park to winter use to increase border security, a move that would effectively end the study. Strange tracks indicate there may be a very large hybrid wolf on the island. But eventually, it's the humans, not the animals, that turn out to be more of a threat.

Bittersweet
Barr's first novel. She says of it, "Bittersweet is the second book I wrote, the first I ever got published. My boss (I was working as an executive assistant for Morgan Stanley in New York at the time) dubbed it a neo-gothic lesbian western. This is a very narrow genre. If you're a new writer I wouldn't suggest this venue."