Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Burn - Nevada Barr







This was a very dark tale – the topic is hard for me to listen to but Barr did a good job keeping it from getting out of hand.  It is very different from other Anna Pigeon stories and Barr must face quite a challenge to keep developing new materials and tales with at least a minimum sense of possibility for this woman who has been a part of every kind of death and mayhem.  The NPS connection here is very minimum – you might even miss it.  It has no relevance other than the connection needed for the series.


Anna Pigeon, a Ranger with the National Park Service, is on administrative leave from her job as she recovers from the traumas of the past couple of months - while the physical wounds have healed, the emotional ones are still healing. With her new husband busy and back at work, Anna decides to go to stay with an old friend from the Park Service, Geneva, who works as a singer at the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Park .Anna isn't in town long before she crosses paths with a tenant of Geneva's, a creepy guy named Jordan. She discovers what seems to be an attempt to place a curse on her - a gruesomely killed pigeon marked with runic symbols - and begins slowly to find traces of very dark doings in the heart of post-Katrina New Orleans. Tied up in all of this evil magic are Jordan, who is not at all what he appears to be; a fugitive mother accused of killing her husband and daughters in a fire; and faint whispers of unpleasant goings-on in the heart of the slowly recovering city. Now it will take all of Anna's skills learned in the untamed outdoors to navigate the urban jungle in which she finds herself, to uncover the threads that connect these seemingly disparate people, and to rescue the most vulnerable of creatures from the most savage of animals.

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