The Nature of Things

Destroyer Angel by Nevada Barr My rating: 3 of 5 stars Long-time fans of Nevada Barr who have followed her Ranger Anna Pigeon series over the years know what to expect by now. There will be bad guys who have no understanding of or respect for the wild environment. They will present a terrible danger to Anna and/or her friends, and Anna, with limited resources, must find a way to rescue them and/or herself and save the day. Anna and Paul, her husband, are now living in Colorado, where Anna is a ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park, but, in this entry to the series, Anna goes on vacation without Paul. She and two friends and her friends' two teenage daughters head off to the Iron Range of upstate Minnesota for an autumn canoe trip. One of her friends is a paraplegic, a former mountain climber who was injured in a fall from a mountain. The other one is an engineer who designs outdoor equipment. Their trip is to be a test of new speciality camping equipment that she has designed to ...

In sixteen previous Anna Pigeon mysteries, author Nevada Barr has given us occasional glimpses of her background and of what led her to the life of a park ranger, but we've never had the full story. Until now.  In this prequel to the series, we learn about Anna's first experience as a 35-year-old seasonal employee with the Park Service at the Glen Canyon National Recreational Area. Anna was running from the heartbreak of her beloved husband's untimely death in New York and running also from her self-destructive reaction to that death. She looked for something different and far away from her life in New York and accepted the first job she was offered.  On arriving at her post, she was assigned to assist an educational/interpretive ranger in cleaning human waste from the beaches in the park. She was literally on shit detail. It was hard physical labor but it turned out to be just what she needed.  Anna came slowly, very slowly, to appreciate some of the wonders of Nature in...