Anna Pigeon is visiting a friend in New Orleans, healing
before returning to work after administrative leave. But of
course, she can't avoid trouble, which starts with a dead
pigeon marked with runic symbols and an unsettling tenant
who lives in her friend's apartment building.
Try as she does to walk away, Anna finds herself drawn into
a woman's desperate attempt to prove that her two young
daughters were kidnapped. The woman, Clare, is wanted for
questioning in the murder of her children and husband.
Anna can't pin down why she's drawn to Clare's story and
why she believes her, but she does. Helping Clare to find
the girls means delving into a part of the world -- of
humanity -- Anna wishes she never had to confront.
Beware: This is a dark, dark book. Not just the usual
bloody bodies and mayhem that surround Anna Pigeon, but a
look at the world that might give you trouble sleeping. I
love the Pigeon books, but I gotta say, this one was
disturbing on a level that pulled me out of the story and
made it hard to focus on the book. Still, all you diehard
series readers won't want to miss Anna's latest adventure.
Nevada Barr brings her acclaimed New York Times bestselling
Anna Pigeon series to Minotaur Books with one of her most
compelling, complex novels yet!
Anna Pigeon, a Ranger with the National Park Service, is
newly married but 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 back at work, Anna
decides to go and stay with an old friend from the Park
Service, Geneva, who works as a singer at the New Orleans
Jazz NHP. She 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 to slowly find traces of very dark doings in the
heart of post-Katrina New Orleans. Tied up in all of this is
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.