Winter Study (Center Point Platinum Mystery (Large Print)) | Nevada Barr

Winter Study (Center Point Platinum Mystery (Large Print)) | Nevada Barr | Anna Returns to Lake Superior

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Winter Study (Cent...

	Winter Study (Center Point Platinum Mystery (Large Print)) Nevada Barr Center Point Large Print, 2008 - 447 pages average customer review:based on 43 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Anna Pigeon returns?in the remarkable new novel from the New York Times?bestselling writer.

It is January, and Park Ranger Anna Pigeon is sent to Isle Royale in Lake Superior to learn about managing and understanding wolves, as her home base of Rocky Mountain National Park might soon have their own pack of the magnificent, much-maligned animals. She?s housed in the island?s bunkhouse with the famed wolf study team, along with two scientists from Homeland Security, who are assessing the study with an eye to opening the park each winter?effectively bringing an end to the fifty-year study?so that it can be manned to secure the scrap of border with Canada.

Soon after Anna?s arrival, the wolf packs under observation begin to act in peculiar ways. Giant wolf prints are found, and Anna spies the form of a great wolf from a surveillance plane. The discovery of wolf scat containing alien DNA leads the team to believe that perhaps a wolf/dog hybrid has been introduced to the island. When a female member of the team is savaged, Anna is convinced she is being stalked, and what was once a beautiful, idyllic refuge becomes a place of unnatural occurrences and danger beyond the ordinary. Alone on an island without electricity or running water, with temperatures hovering around zero both day and night, Anna fights not only for the wolves, but for also her own survival.

Filled with the nail-biting suspense, richly drawn characters and gorgeous nature writing that are her hallmarks, Winter Study is vintage Barr, proving once again that she?s ?a real writer, in every sense of the word? (The Denver Post).

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Nevada Barr's "Winter Study"

Anna Pigeon has a Winter Study (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)rather tumultous series of experiences in this book - more than "usual" but held interest and was a 'good read' --

Anna Returns to Lake Superior

I've always thought that "A Superior Death," an earlier entry in Nevada Barr's always-fabulous series about park ranger Anna Pigeon, was one of the very best. It was also almost too scary to read. So I started "Winter Study" with a bit of trepidation: What would happen to Anna now?

Plenty. We find Anna older and a lot crankier, stuck in a park in the snowy tundra near Lake Superior where the only happy campers are the wolves and the moose. Anna is part of a team that includes several wolf researchers and other experts, and a smarmy Homeland Security agent; why he is there is more than needs explaining in this review.

Soon enough, scary and desperate things start to happen, from the possible sighting of a mythical half dog-half wolf of gargantuan and unworldly proportions, to the disapperance of a young researcher to scary messages traced on a window to much, much more.

Throughout it all, we literally feel the cold. We can feel the frostbite, the fear, the desperation--everything. It's as though we are there. It is truly uncanny.

My only complaint is that Anna's marriage to Paul, while given some words, is only that, words. She is always parted from him and it doesn't feel real. I miss her dog Taco (which morphed breeds in an earlier book from a golden retriever to a black lab), and I miss her sister. Anna seems almost eerily isolated--but maybe that's the point.

As always, a wonderful read in the series.

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A hot read for a cold night!

If you enjoy your mysteries with elements of danger, not only from the usual suspects, but also from an unforgiving Mother Nature, then "Winter Study" is sure to put a little extra chill in your winter reading.

For those of you unfamiliar with Anna Pigeon and her series sleuth, Nevada Barr, this is an excellent introduction to both. Nevada Barr is employed by the national park service, which gives Pigeon an excuse to send her around the country where we are introduced to the beauties (and dangers) of our national parks and, of course, another mystery.

"Winter Study" brings Nevada back to Isle Royale in the dead of winter in the midst of a suddenly controversial wolf study that is one of the longest on-going naturalist studies in the U. S. What begins as a potentially boring 6 weeks of mostly finding and examining wolf "poop" quickly becomes a deadly mystery involving the presence of a murderous hybrid wolf and a murderous colleague.

Pigeon puts Nevada in possibly the most precarious situations she has ever been in, because the killer has Mother Nature as a willing ally. Even as the story nears its climax, Nevada is unsure of surviving the brutal winter elements long enought to bring the killer to justice.

Pigeon is at the top of her game in this novel, and even injects more than the usual humor about the politics of the different bureaucracies she must deal with. Her descriptions of Isle Royale and its climatic disregard for its inhabitants, animal and human, are vivid and realistic. A great read for a winter night!

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