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Summary
Summary
Soon after Anna Pigeon joins the famed wolf study team of Isle Royale National Park in the middle of Lake Superior, the wolf packs begin to behave in peculiar ways. Giant wolf prints are found, and Anna spies the form of a great wolf from a surveillance plane. When a female member of the team is savaged, Anna is convinced they are being stalked, and what was once a beautiful, idyllic refuge becomes a place of unnatural occurrences and danger beyond the ordinary...
Author Notes
Nevada Barr was born on March 1, 1952. She is the author of a series of mysteries involving national parks. She draws on her own experience as a National Park Service ranger to thrill readers with the majesty of nature. Anna Pigeon, the heroine of such novels as A Superior Death and Endangered Species, is a rough-and-tough ranger who left the wilds of New York for the great outdoors, and is modeled after Barr.
Barr began writing in 1978, garnering national attention with the publication in 1993 of Track of the Cat, which won both the Agatha and Anthony awards for Best First Mystery Novel. Her novels are known for breathtaking descriptions of nature, diverse settings, and a no-nonsense heroine. She also provides frequently unflattering portrayals of the National Park Service.
Her works include 13 1/2, Winterstudy, Borderline, Burn, The Rope and Destroyer Angel.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In bestseller Barr's chilling 14th mystery thriller to feature National Park Service ranger Anna Pigeon (after 2005's Hard Truth), Anna joins the team of Winter Study, a research project intended to study the wolves and moose of Michigan's Isle Royale National Park, the setting for 1994's A Superior Death. Complicating the study is Bob Menechinn, an untrustworthy Homeland Security officer assigned to shadow the research. Crowded into inhospitable lodgings and persecuted by unrelenting cold, Anna is far from her comfort zone as nature turns awry with a series of bizarre events. The team stumbles upon the tracks-and the mutilated victim-of a preternaturally large, unidentified beast, and local packs of wolves descend on human-populated areas, a behavior out of step with their species. The campfire legends of youth metastasize into adult fears as Anna must piece together a connection between these anomalies while guarding herself from the strangers around her. Barr's visceral descriptions of the winter cold nicely complement the paranoia that follows the appearance of the mythic monsters at play. Author tour. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Readers who have followed intrepid forest ranger Anna Pigeon fighting forest fires, crawling through caves, investigating crimes at national monuments, and tracking bears in service of our National Park system will find her back almost where she began, at Isle Royale National Park. Unlike her earlier visit (A Superior Death, 2003), however, this one takes place during the dead of winter, when the park is usually closed to all but the wolves and moose and the researchers who have been studying them in their unique environment. This year, however, tension is high; Homeland Security may shut down the winter study project, which has been going on for 50 years. But Anna, in her usual role as Park Service interloper-emissary ( How would you like to snowshoe over rough terrain, collecting blood-fat ticks and moose piss? ) suspects that there's more at stake here than the study, and when murder intrudes, she knows she's right. The environmental quotient in Barr's novels is always high; the facts about wolves are fascinating, as are descriptions of frigid landscape, alternately beautiful and horrifying. There's plenty of drama, too, as Anna finds herself alone and in danger more than once, but what many readers return to this series for is Anna herself, strong, funny, perceptive, and well aware that she is a small part of a dynamic, ever-changing natural world.--Zvirin, Stephanie Copyright 2008 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Strange things start happening when Park Ranger Anna Pigeon arrives on Isle Royale in Lake Superior to help observe wolves. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
