High Country: An Anna Pigeon Mystery [Large Print] [Hardcover]

Nevada Barr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 14, 2004

A New York Times Bestselling Author

It's fall in the Sierra Mountains, and Anna Pigeon is slinging hash in Yosemite National Park's historic Ahwahnee Hotel. Four young seasonal park employees have disappeared, and crack search-and-rescue teams failed to turn up a single clue. Working undercover, Anna is detailed to dining-room duty; after a week of waiting tables, she knows the missing employees are only the first indications of a sickness threatening the park.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When four young employees of Yosemite National Park disappear, ranger Anna Pigeon goes undercover as a waitress at the Ahwahnee Lodge to investigate. Living in the staff dorm, she soon discovers there's a connection between at least one of the missing girls, a crashed plane containing a fortune in drugs, and the outsiders who've moved into the tent cabin last occupied by a skilled climber who's also among the disappeared. The first attempt on her life doesn't scare her away, but the second is nearly fatal, and Anna's harrowing escape keeps the tension ratcheted up until the denouement. As usual, Nevada Barr turns in a well-paced thriller featuring a compelling protagonist and a strong cast of minor characters, but it's her brilliantly etched landscapes that bring readers back to this popular series again and again. High Country is Anna's thirteenth outing, and it's one of her strongest. --Jane Adams --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

The serene snow country suddenly turns deadly for Anna Pigeon in Barr's riveting 12th novel to feature the intrepid National Park Service ranger (after 2003's Flashback). On assignment to locate four young park employees who went missing in a fierce storm, the 50ish Anna is working undercover as a waitress at Yosemite's Ahwahnee Hotel, where she must deal not only with an exacting supervisor and a surly head chef but also share a dorm with 20-something roommates. Evoking the stunning beauty of the park in winter, Barr contrasts the relative safety of Yosemite Valley with the surrounding Sierra Nevada mountains into which Anna treks in search of the missing kids. Danger crackles like ice on the frozen lake where she finds a partially submerged plane loaded with drugs. Attacked by vicious poachers, Anna flees into the absolute, terrifying darkness for an ordeal that will keep readers eagerly turning the pages. So well done is this nail-biting sequence that the resolution can come only as something of a letdown. Barr has a true gift for outdoor writing, using the lush snow as natural cover for the violent life in the wild as well as among the park's human custodians. Anyone contemplating a nice winter hike will think twice after entering the wilderness with Anna, but her fans always come back for more.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Wheeler Publishing; 1 edition (May 14, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1587246376
• ISBN-13: 978-1587246371
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (74 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,129,564 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Nevada was born in the small western town of Yerington, Nevada and raised on a mountain airport in the Sierras. Both her parents were pilots and mechanics and her sister, Molly, continued the tradition by becoming a pilot for USAir.
Pushed out of the nest, Nevada fell into the theatre, receiving her BA in speech and drama and her MFA in Acting before making the pilgrimage to New York City, then Minneapolis, MN. For eighteen years she worked on stage, in commercials, industrial training films and did voice-overs for radio. During this time she became interested in the environmental movement and began working in the National Parks during the summers -- Isle Royale in Michigan, Guadalupe Mountains in Texas, Mesa Verde in Colorado, and then on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi.
Woven throughout these seemingly disparate careers was the written word. Nevada wrote and presented campfire stories, taught storytelling and was a travel writer and restaurant critic. Her first novel, Bitterweet was published in 1983. The Anna Pigeon series, featuring a female park ranger as the protagonist, started when she married her love of writing with her love of the wilderness, the summer she worked in west Texas. The first book, Track of the Cat, was brought to light in 1993 and won both the Agatha and Anthony awards for best first mystery. The series was well received and A Superior Death, loosely based on Nevada's experiences as a boat patrol ranger on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, was published in 1994. In 1995 Ill Wind came out. It was set in Mesa Verde, Colorado where Nevada worked as a law enforcement ranger for two seasons.
The rest is, shall we say, HISTORY! Nevada's books and accomplishments have become numerous and the presses continue to roll, so in the interest of NOT having to update this page, books, awards, status on the New York Times Best Seller List -- and more -- will be enumerated with the relevant books else where on this website.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Darkly challenging, June 12, 2005

By 

Richard A. Lovett (West Coast, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: High Country (An Anna Pigeon Novel) (Mass Market Paperback)

Nevada Barr is at her best in Western settings, where her characters have room to roam. In this book, she returns to the west, but sets her story in a Novemberish Yosemite, hemmed in by clouds, trapped fog-like, barely above the treetops. A lot of reviewers of the hardback complained about that, but they've obviously never lived in a climate that can produce this kind of weather for two weeks at a crack. I do. It can chill you, right to the soul.

Which is what this book is all about. The set-up is simple enough: Anna Pigeon, upwardly mobile park ranger, is working undercover in a swank hotel as a waitress, hoping to suss out the fate of four hikers who went missing and are presumably dead. But what this book is really about is evil: the human evil that, like endless November fog, can invade even sacred places like Yosemite; and the spiritual evil to which some people have surrendered more than others, but which is beneath the skin of us all. Opposing this, Barr sets a collection of women of varying degrees of spiritual and emotional innocence (and in some cases, intellectual innocence) and throughout, she uses undercover detective work as a metaphor for the loss and retaining of one's identity in the face of pressures that would make you someone you don't want to be.

Basically, this is Barr's most ambitious work, and for about 350 pages it works stunningly. In the final 50 pages it comes partially unglued-one of the critical innocence-related plot threads gets dropped, and the behavior of some of the villains seems to have been altogether too convoluted, given their motives. For those reasons, I can't give the book a perfect score.

Bottom line: This is a very good book. But beware, it's darker than the normal Anna Pigeon fare, and the normally sunny landscapes of Barr's natural world share in the darkness.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Its a Bird, It's a plane....It's Super Anna!", July 17, 2005

By 

FinerLines "JCF" (Connecticut) - See all my reviews

This review is from: High Country (An Anna Pigeon Novel) (Mass Market Paperback)

I am an avid Nevada Barr reader, and can't wait for every new book she brings me with Anna Pigeon's next adventure. This one, however, dealt less with the wonderful, descriptive visual images of the National Park,in this case,Yosemite,and more with Anna having to do chase scenes of superhuman acts under more and more physical duress than any "normal", or even, "super middle-aged Anna" could be expected to realistically do!

Barr does not even begin to pull off the reality of Anna's waitress character's relationships to young people, as anyone who works with such an age group can see right through. The one, really believable character, Lorraine Knight, is MIA at times that prove unrealistic. Is anyone really surprised by the "ringleader" of the drug gang? Any mystery reader can figure that out pretty early on. Add to this ad naseum chase scenes, and this definitely is one of Anna's most forgetable adventures in one of America's most unforgetable parks!

Even with that, I wouldn't miss reading any of Barr's Pigeon books. We all have our 'bad days', and, regardless of how outrageous the plot can be, Barr always shows us the wonderful, human and evolutionary side of Anna Pigeon!

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Anna Pigeon goes undercover in Yosemite, February 5, 2004

By 

Corinne H. Smith (Athol, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: High Country (Hardcover)

Our favorite NPS ranger Anna Pigeon has been called to California in order to quietly investigate the disappearance of four young people. While she "works" as a waitress in the Ahwahnne Hotel restaurant, she keeps her eyes open, asks questions, and noses around a bit. After she takes a long hike and finds a secret lurking in a remote area of the park, the action takes off and this book is difficult to put down. (Turns out the elevation isn't the only thing in the park that's "high.") Anna ends up finding some rather nasty folks in the midst of the spectacular glacial scenery. Thank goodness she's a trained and capable law enforcement officer and outdoors-person. A lesser woman wouldn't make it past page 155! Following the style of Nevada Barr's earlier titles, this engaging story ends with the best moral of all: There's no place like home.