A dozen years ago, while I held down the business desk at a nearby newspaper, my wife and fellow Nevada Barr fan traveled to that inimitable bookstore near the old Oxford, Mississippi, courthouse – Square Books – to hear a reading of Barr's latest mystery and to secure a signed copy of the book. Upon reaching Nevada's table, Joy told her about my own tilting at literary windmills in search of an agent and publisher, and Nevada – proffering her father's best advice that kept her going at a similar stage in her career – signed our copy with the sagacious line, "Keep wearin' the bastards down! – Nevada Barr."
Barr and her resourceful National Park Service ranger/protagonist Anna Pigeon have been doing precisely that to villains for decades now. The formula for Barr's mystery series succeeds because it is, in fact, no rote formula at all. Oh, there's a pattern, to be sure. The series is rooted in the spectacular scenery of natural U.S. wonders and flames to life in the discerning eye of a naturalist author, who herself served a long tenure in the U.S. Park Services and is a one-time theater actress with a great ear for the dramatic.
One stays with certain authors because of such talent – and for their tenacity, their propinquity to the reader's heart, and their ability to tell a tale well. So it is with Nevada Barr, whom I discovered a generation ago with A Superior Death and, bracktracking to the beginning, Track of the Cat. Protagonist Pigeon, then and now, is tough as nails but graceful and erudite, too. She's a stunning combination, particularly when set against the backdrop of the nation's most beautiful but rugged territory.
In Destroyer Angel, Piegon joins two friends and their daughters on a vacation to the remote Iron Range territory of northern Minnesota. Anna's desire to take a peaceable solo canoe ride pays dividends when the rest of her party is taken hostage by a motley crew of street criminals led by a towering, intelligent man known only as "The Dude." There's no Coen brothers romp here, but a ransom thriller ensues, with The Dude mushing his retinue of hostages while Anna, unknown to the kidnappers, stalks them through the Minnesota woods. One of Anna's hostage friends – thirtysomething Leah Hendricks – is a brilliant inventor of recreational gear and possessor of a fortune The Dude and his associates covet. There's a paraplegic female friend of Anna's on the trip, Heath; a pair of plucky, petulant teens – Katie and Elizabeth; and a dog named for the Looney Tunes Wile E. Coyote character. By Page 290, with Leah and Katie being held elsewhere by The Dude, Barr describes the beleaguered band this way: "Between them, Anna, Elizabeth, Heath, and Wily had five good arms, seven good legs, one set of pointy teeth, a sharp-edged chunk of twisted aluminum, and a clock." We don't learn the full identity of The Dude until Page 300, and that's the prime carrot Barr dangles before the reader in what likely is the most intensely physical, brutal case of Anna Pigeon's career.
The hunt is the thing here. And with it, the violence can be unrelenting, the humor dark and the observations scatalogical. I offer my four-star rating with some reservations for those reasons, and this reality: You'll enjoy less of the scenery and the park culture here than is typical for an Anna Pigeon novel. (For a cracking good portrayal of the physical facets of the Iron Range and its fascinating Native American culture, see William Kent Krueger's outstanding mystery, The Vermilion Drift.)
There's no denying the palpable suspense in Destroyer Angel– which crackles at the close with a brilliant use of flora suggested by the title – and Anna Pigeon never worked so hard to wear the bastards down. She's tracking an existential code here, one that pits woman against nature, and women against the depravity of mankind. It's a code more civil than Thelma & Louise and less morally complex than Deliverance. Still, it's Anna Piegon's deliverance, and we sit back, enthralled, and drink in the drama.
###
More from Nevada Barr