"Hands down, Anna Pigeon is the most complex protagonist
in crime fiction," proclaimed the Philadelphia Inquirer of
the heroine of last year's Endangered Species. "Barr
possesses that rare combination of talents: she can write
a beautiful sentence and she can create a first-rate
mystery," said Publishers Weekly. In Blind Descent, Anna
Pigeon faces personal demons as well as life-threatening
dangers in an untamed underground wilderness for which
neither training nor her love of the outdoors has prepared
her. Lechuguilla Cavern is a man-eating cave discovered in
New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns National Park in the mid-
1980s. Estimated to extend for more than three hundred
miles, only ninety of them mapped, the cave was formed by
acid burning away the limestone; corridors, pits, cramped
wormholes, cliffs and splendid rooms the size of football
fields tangle together in a maze shrouded in the utter
darkness of the underground. When a fellow ranger is
injured in a caving accident, Anna swallows her paralyzing
fear of small spaces and descends into Lechuguilla to help
a friend in need. Worse than the claustrophobia that
haunts her are the signs-some natural, and some, more
ominously, man-made-that not everyone is destined to
emerge from this wondrous living tomb. All the skills Anna
has honed in the terrestrial world are called into play on
precipitous climbs, exhausting treks, and descents into
canyons that have never seen the sun. The terrain is alien
and hostile, the greed and destructive powers of mankind
all too familiar. In this place of internal terrors, Anna
must learn whom she can trust, and, in the end, decide who
is to live and who is to die.
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