In the midst of a dangerously dry season, national park
ranger Anna Pigeon has been posted to Cumberland Island
off the Georgia coast for a monotonous, twenty-one day
fire watch. But her boredom is short-lived, for this
remote and marshy place is breeding ground for more than
just the imperiled Loggerhead turtle; it also spawns
eccentricity and secrets, greed, suspicion. . .and
murder.
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 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 endangered creature on the island.