Burn (Anna Pigeon Series #16) »

A former actress, restaurant critic, and National Park Service ranger, Nevada Barr is best known for her bestselling series of mysteries starring her intrepid heroine -- and alter ego -- Anna Pigeon.

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.

The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio

This uncharacteristically urban novel may not present Anna with any endangered species to protect or environmental threats to ward off, but it does give her a chance to prove that her outdoor skills are adaptable to city streets…By the time Clare and Anna join forces to infiltrate a brothel that trades in children, Barr is writing with the kind of ferocity she usually saves for her backcountry adventures.