It's not a book for claustrophobes

Nevada Barr was a Park Ranger in the National Forest Service when in the early 1990s she created Anna Pigeon, a Park Ranger in the National Forest Service who finds herself embroiled in crimes in America's national parks.The first Anna Pigeon mystery, The Track of the Cat, was published in 1993. The most recent, Boar Island, the 19th, was published in 2016.

She published her first book, Bittersweet, in 1983 when she was 31. She describes it as “a kind of ‘cowboy’ book because I'd grown up on westerns and loved those; it had a female hero and was a bit uneven," Unfortunately, “The publishing house really didn't know what to do with it. A neo-gothic lesbian western? I think it sold 1200 copies and then went out of print.” But after Bittersweet, Barr sold nothing for ten years. “I'd written a lot of stuff,  but it just wasn't selling.”

At the time she was living in Minneapolis, and says she actually made a pretty decent living there doing voice-overs. industrial training films, and an occasional play. She liked Minneapolis—“but it was just too cold!” Moreover, “I wasn't going to go any further. I was 37 years old, and you know men can kind of slide into the old silver fox thing, but women just start to lose work. I also was getting tired of it, and I became very interested in the environmental movement. The Park Service seemed like a really neat way to segue out of acting because I could do it during the summers and still make a living as an actor during the winters.” She quit acting entirely and entered the Park Service full time when she was 40. Anna Pigeon was a natural result.

Although Track of the Cat was a prize-winner and led to a contract for more books, I did not care for it, feeling that it has many flaws of a first book—although it was not one. 

On the other hand, I cannot recommend highly enough Blind Descent, the sixth book in the series by which time Barr was fully in control of the characters, the situation, and the environment, which is almost a character itself.

Anna is dispatched to Carlsbad Caverns National Park when her close friend and fellow ranger, Frieda Dierkz, is severely injured while exploring the treacherous, labyrinthine depths of Lechuguilla Cave (which is a real place). Battling her claustrophobia, Anna fights her terror and joins the rescue mission.The After hours of squeezing through narrow wormholes and crawling through inky blackness, Anna reaches her injured friend. In a fleeting moment of lucidity, Frieda whispers a warning: her fall was no accident.

Before the team can successfully extract her, however, a second incident results in Frieda's death and nearly kills Anna as well. She realizes a killer is underground with them, although why is just one mystery among several. Anna is, in effect, in a "closed-room" murder mystery deep beneath the earth. As the survivors return to the surface, Anna has to unravel a web of complicated relationships, shady business practices, and park politics to identify the murderer.

I think the book succeeds because Barr is able to evoke the absolute blackness, the absolute strangeness of a cave. She describes in detail the equipment cavers must use to descend 150 feet into the darkness—and climb back out. The motive for the murder makes sense to me as does the identity of the killer, which is not always the case. If Nevada Barr is a new name to you, and if you read mysteries, I recommend Blind Descent.