This is the 14th book in Nevada Barr’s “Anna Pigeon” mystery series. In each book, Anna, a law enforcement ranger with the National Park Service, has been thrust into solving crimes committed in the parks where she works. In this book, she returns to her old stomping grounds on Isle Royale in northwestern Lake Superior.
It has been almost 14 years since
Ranger Anna Pigeon worked on Isle Royale (see Nevada Barr’s second
book, A Superior Death), but this visit is different because she is
going out in January rather than during the summer visitor season. Anna
is now a ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park, and as wolves
recolonize their historic range in the American west after years of
protection under the Endangered Species Act, Anna’s superiors are
developing a management plan for the recently delisted species. So Anna
is sent to Isle Royale to learn how to run a wolf research and
monitoring program from those who are currently conducting the world’s
longest sustained study of wild wolves.
As the story
begins, we learn that the Department of Homeland Security, seeking to
seal the country’s northern border against any covert entry by
terrorists, is assessing the possibility of opening Isle Royale
year-round (currently, the island is only open to visitors from April
through October). This is a problem for the island’s famed wolf-moose
study because “winter study” is the time from January to March when
researchers visit the island to determine population sizes for the two
animals and to capture and radio-collar wolves, something more easily
done without visitors on the ground annoyed at the intrusion on their
wilderness experience. Additionally, winter is the time when the island
reclaims its wild nature and wolves and moose are left to carry out
their dance of life and death as they have for over half a century. In
particular, it is the mating and denning time for wolves, a sensitive
period that could be negatively impacted by a constant human presence.
Consequently, DHS is looking to see if the
wolf-moose study has learned all it can and if it should be shut down
in the name of year-round recreational opportunities and increased
border security.
The mystery that unfolds is solidly engaging. There seems
to be a new wolf on the island – DNA
collected from wolf scat does not match any of the other individuals
already living there. Moreover, this “alien wolf” seems to be unusually
large as evidenced by tracks that the team finds, the brief glimpse of
a silhouette Anna glimpses from the air, and the signs it leaves on
dead wolves found by the winter study team. Finally, when one of the
researchers goes missing, the concept of predator and prey takes on a
whole new meaning, and Anna finds the remote island she once loved to
be more claustrophobic than she remembers and more dangerous than she
planned on.
The dark and sometimes cutting humor that Barr
(a former National Park Service ranger) has bestowed on her alter ego
in previous books is still here and just as funny. When Anna breaks
through the ice on one of the inland lakes, she has to convince Bob
Menechinn, the DHS agent, to save her rather
than waiting for help to arrive from somewhere else. But Menechinn, who
has proven to be incompetent outside of an office setting and something
of a coward despite his macho act, is unmoved.
When Anna finally puts the pieces together and
learns the terrible truth behind the strange occurrences, the reader is
hurtled toward the book’s jarring and fatal conclusion.
