Customer Reviews

Ill Wind (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Anna Pigeon, is now at home in Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, but murder also invades the Anasazi ruins. Why do some of the tourists die while viewing the caves? This becomes a significant question when a child dies; the previous deaths were attributed to natural circumstance. The value of medical training for a park ranger is detailed in giving aid to these unfortunate visitors.

Death continues to visit this land where the question of "what happened to the Anasazi" is as ingrained to archaeologists in the real world as it is in the world of Anna Pigeon. It is clear that Nevada Barr has studied the ancient Native American history and searched for answers to this question. Is not a journey into history, but an adventure into murder and money.

Nevada Barr excels in creating believable characters, situations and solutions.

Nevada Barr really hit her stride in Ill Wind, the third in her wonderful Anna Pigeon series.

In this tale, park ranger Anna is stationed at Colorado's Mesa Verde park, where the famous cliff dwellings draw tourists from all over the world. As in her other two books, Barr makes the reader experience the site. It is her great gift--reading about the kivas and mesas and the haunting spirits of the primitive Anasazi, who originally constructed the mesas, I felt I was there. I could feel the heat of the air, smell the surrounding vegetation, feel the sandstone. And, along with Anna, who is becoming more likeable with every book, I worried about seemingly nefarious activites in the park--of of which ends in the death of a fellow ranger. Anna knows the death is not accidental, but try as she might, she cannot put together the increasingly strange and seemingly unrelated clues.

Along comes "Fred the Fed," whom we met the last book. He and Anna team up to solve the mystery, and the interplay between them is a true delight.

I find this series a true delight as well; the concept of a park ranger as law-enforcement detective is so different, and so perfect, as are the descriptions of the incredible national parks. I am getting a real education, here! This is the perfect book to take to the beachl or the pool or the park--easy, fun, gently suspenseful, and perfect.

Mesa Verde is fun. Anna Pigeon is a fun character, even if she's a bit grumpy. Her FBI counterpart is even more fun-I liked him the moment he showed up in "A Superior Death," even if Anna then found him to be a bit of a buffoon. But somehow the pieces of this story don't come together as well as they do in the best Anna Pigeon mysteries, such as "Firestorm," "A Superior Death," "Blind Descent," and "Deep South." Maybe Barr was still learning her art when she wrote this one; the problem is that the villain isn't as well developed as the setting or the Anna Pigeon character (she had the same problem, in fact, in her first book, "Track of the Cat"). Anna, the park, the FBI guy, even her long-distance relationship with her sister Molly-all of these upstage the plot that's supposed to bind them together, producing the odd result of a book that's undercut by its greatest strengths. Still, there's no such thing as a bad Anna Pigeon book: just varying degrees of good. This one's at the lower end of the range.

"Ill Wind" exemplifies what Nevada Barr does so well. She gives us a sense of place making us part of the southwest she loves so much. The descriptive scenes are breathtaking.

I am very fond of Anna Pigeon, her vulnerabilities balance her awesome virtues. Her very physical confrontations with evil make we wince; Anna gives new meaning to the word "resilliance." Her alcoholism is a very real factor in her makeup; the author is deft in her understanding and descriptions.

The plot is somewhat loose and scattered. There are enough characters to be confusing, though Ms. Barr is careful not to make them interchangeable. Because the physical landscape is loose and sprawling, the reader is more forgiving of a plot with the same features.

Ill Wind has some wonderful humorous dialogue, very clever, wry and funny. Frederick Spalding is a delightful personality, about as far from your average FBI agent as you can get.

This is a feel-good, satisfying read.

Ill Wind, the third book in Nevada Barr's Anna Pigeon mystery series, is enthralling and believable. Not only does this book have an amazing mystery (linking the murder with the Anasazi), its characters are very believable and lifelike. Not one character is perfect, and all have realistic backgrounds and original personalities. Ill Wind is different from all other mysteries I have read: it moves at a pace unique to itself, its characters are wonderfully and originally written, and the occurances are plausable and believable. I'd say more but I'd run out of room. Great book, great series!

I always enjoy Barr's novels because they just strike me as so real. She's done an excellent job of creating a likable character in Anna Pigeon. Anna's wisecracks and her flaws and her admirable traits all combine to make her a character with which the reader is comfortable, a person for whom the reader can cheer.

Another plus of these novels are the vivid settings for each and the way in which Barr lovingly describes them. The author's previous experiences as a park ranger give her work an authenticity that is especially striking. There is a great deal of passion in the description of places and it only heightens the way in which places speak so much to Anna while people remain somewhat beyond her reach.

This was a very nicely written mystery with many seemingly disparate threads that the author was able to tie up very neatly at the end. It was suspenseful and intriguing and I always find her books to be quick reads because they are so compelling that I devour them, eager to find out what will happen next.

This book has also been published with the title "Mountain of Bones" so don't buy it twice like I did!

I like these books. They are not predictable, which is unusual and good. After reading so many crime novels and about forensics, it is refreshing not to be able to pick the killer, and be thinking for half the book "c'mon stupid main character, he/she's the killer!"

The only problem I have is the long bits of describing the scenery.

I received this book from a friend. I had never read Nevada Barr before, but I was intrigued by the Park Ranger main character, Anna Pigeon, and the setting in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, home to the Anasazi peoples who abruptly disappeared eight hundred years ago.

Unfortunately Barr doesn't concentrate on the Anasazi. Instead the conflict centers on Tom Silva, a divorced pipeline rigger who wants his wife back. He sends her his foreskin in the mail, and Anna is called on to deal with him. The Mesa Verde rangers are part-time rangers and part-time police officers.

The problem with the book is Barr's choice of the author limited point of view. She's in the character's head constantly. Author limited can be a good choice if you're interested in portraying emotion, but it also can lead to too much internal monologue, especially during dramatic scenes. Pigeon is a recently widowed woman; she's also new at Mesa Verde and is having trouble dealing with her roommates. She also phones her psychiatrist sister for advice quite often, and she's got a drinking problem. If you're thinking she sounds maudlin, you're right.

The story finally picks up after the first hundred pages or so when one of the other rangers disappears. He's found at the bottom of a kiva with burn marks on his arms. It looks like a suicide. Barr decides to throw in a foiled love affair with Pigeon to heighten the tension.

Despite the above, the novel does have some touching moments. The dead ranger's has a six-year-old daughter who's a little dearie, and her Aunt Hattie is certainly "uplifting" as well. The daughter happens to be a dwarf. I know it sounds unbelievable, but Barr manages to handle this quite well. Add a rather eccentric FBI agent to the mix, and matters improve considerably.

Again, Nevada Barr weaves in a virtual vacation in a national park with a murder mystery. Her detective, park ranger Anna Pigeon, intricately blends the park, the crime and her own emotional history into a story which satisfies on many levels. The only regret at the end is that the vacation is over.

The park rangers of Mesa Verde National Park are used to being called out to answer medical emergencies. Usually, the emergencies involve breathing difficulties due to the high altitude, and Anna Pigeon and her colleagues are well equipped to handle them. What they're not so used to is finding dead bodies, but that's what they find this time.

As well as finding a dead body and having to work out whether the cause of death was accident or foul play, the has been an alarming increase in the number of medical emergencies this summer, particularly on Tuesday mornings. Very curious.

With the beautiful and mysterious backdrop of the Mesa Verde National Park setting a haunting tone to every scene, we are presented with some very perplexing mysteries. Anna Pigeon is ably assisted in her investigation by Frederick Stanton, a quirky and very likable FBI agent. He and Anna make a good team, working companionably together, trading light-hearted comments and generally complementing each other very nicely.

All in all, Ill Wind is a very enjoyable mystery incorporating vivid images of the surrounding land that is very pleasing to the mind's eye.