Winter Study (Anna Pigeon Series) [Abridged, Audiobook, CD] [Audio CD]

Nevada Barr (Author), Joyce Bean (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2008 | Series: Anna Pigeon Series (Book 14)

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 its own pack of the magnificent, much- maligned animals. She’s lodging 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 in the winters - an act that would effectively bring an end to the fifty-year project - so that the area can be manned to secure the scrap of border with Canada. Soon after Anna’s arrival, the wolf packs under observation begin to behave 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 group 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 her own survival as well.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In bestseller Barr's chilling 14th mystery thriller to feature National Park Service ranger Anna Pigeon (after 2005's Hard Truth), Anna joins the team of Winter Study, a research project intended to study the wolves and moose of Michigan's Isle Royale National Park, the setting for 1994's A Superior Death. Complicating the study is Bob Menechinn, an untrustworthy Homeland Security officer assigned to shadow the research. Crowded into inhospitable lodgings and persecuted by unrelenting cold, Anna is far from her comfort zone as nature turns awry with a series of bizarre events. The team stumbles upon the tracks—and the mutilated victim—of a preternaturally large, unidentified beast, and local packs of wolves descend on human-populated areas, a behavior out of step with their species. The campfire legends of youth metastasize into adult fears as Anna must piece together a connection between these anomalies while guarding herself from the strangers around her. Barr's visceral descriptions of the winter cold nicely complement the paranoia that follows the appearance of the mythic monsters at play. Author tour. (Apr.)
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.

From Booklist

Readers who have followed intrepid forest ranger Anna Pigeon fighting forest fires, crawling through caves, investigating crimes at national monuments, and tracking bears in service of our National Park system will find her back almost where she began, at Isle Royale National Park. Unlike her earlier visit (A Superior Death, 2003), however, this one takes place during the dead of winter, when the park is usually closed to all but the wolves and moose and the researchers who have been studying them in their unique environment. This year, however, tension is high; Homeland Security may shut down the winter study project, which has been going on for 50 years. But Anna, in her usual role as Park Service interloper-emissary (“How would you like to snowshoe over rough terrain, collecting blood-fat ticks and moose piss?”) suspects that there’s more at stake here than the study, and when murder intrudes, she knows she’s right. The environmental quotient in Barr’s novels is always high; the facts about wolves are fascinating, as are descriptions of frigid landscape, alternately beautiful and horrifying. There’s plenty of drama, too, as Anna finds herself alone and in danger more than once, but what many readers return to this series for is Anna herself, strong, funny, perceptive, and well aware that she is a small part of a dynamic, ever-changing natural world. --Stephanie Zvirin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio on CD; Abridged edition (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1423325621
• ISBN-13: 978-1423325628
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (87 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,366,277 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

69 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars scared stiff, April 12, 2008

By 

Julia M. Walker (NY Finger Lakes) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Winter Study (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (Hardcover)

Nevada Barr's NPS Ranger, Anna Pigeon, is a strong and brave woman. She treks through various wildernesses, descends into bottomless caves, fights fires, saves children, both human and lupine. She's the only character I've ever known who actually employs the self-defense strategy most women can't stomach - gouging out an attacker's eyes. She has taken an ax to the head of a man. But Anna isn't a walking instrument of destruction. She loves nature, loves the wild and celebrates it knowledgably. She loves her sister, Molly, her pets, her friends in various parks, her new husband. In all of Barr's books we spend so much time in Anna's head that first-person narration would be redundant, but that's OK. Anna's head is a good place to be. I admire her. Even though she rarely looks beyond the parameters of the task at hand, she is able to go out and do what needs to be done in her world. She sustains many injuries, but she survives and triumphs, a middle-aged argument for mind over matter. She's not a super-hero, nor would I wish her to be. A bit more imaginative than Kinsey Milhone, less careless than V.I. Warshawski, Anna is a solid character who has evolved through a carefully crafted and amazingly consistent series.

In this novel, Barr takes us back to the scene of the second book in her series, Isle Royale in Lake Superior. Rather than the deep-diving of that adventure, we have frozen treks across the island, a terrain less dramatic, if no less deadly, than the amazing spaces of Yosemite, the setting for High Country. That book was the previous holder of the series' Most-Violent-Action Award, but Winter Study surpasses it with a blend of atavistic terror and human malice that's hard to read. The natural threats are so terrifyingly described and the human perversion is so graphically portrayed that, several times, I had to put the book down and walk away. I just finished it and my neck and shoulders are stiffly painful from the tension.

While that's a visceral tribute to Barr's talent as a writer, I'm not planning to re-read the novel. The wildness of the wolves and the beauty of the island are as vividly described as the terror and the dark deeds, but the latter cast shadows that are too heavy for pleasure reading. If you like the dark side, you may disagree, but I'd advise reading this fast - airplane (or airport) style. It's not a book to savor; it's a book to finish quickly, in the daylight.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tense drama in an isolated setting, April 23, 2008

By 

Karen Potts (Lake Jackson, Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Winter Study (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) (Hardcover)

Nevada Barr's latest national park mystery is set in Isle Royal, a remote island off the coast of Michigan. Her heroine, Anna Pigeon, has been sent from her assignment at Rocky Mountain National Park to Isle Royal to observe a 50-year-old study on wolves in order to prepare her for managing wolves at her home park in Colorado. Barr does a great job of evoking the cold, barren wilderness of an Isle Royal winter with very few amenities for its inhabitants. As a reader, I felt every windchill and heard every wolf call in the book. Her characters, many of them thoroughly unlikeable, are drawn with a careful eye to detail and believability. Each one is motivated by a powerful force, whether it be personal or professional. Anna herself is roughed up more often than is necessary and the repeated scenes of her narrow escapes begin to lose effectiveness after awhile. Despite this flaw and the darkness mentioned by other reviewers, this book should please Nevada Barr's many fans.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I liked her books better without an agenda..., April 18, 2009

By 

PNWmuse - See all my reviews

This review is from: Winter Study (An Anna Pigeon Novel) (Mass Market Paperback)

Up to now, I have read Nevada Barr's books practically savoring every word. I have travelled to many National Parks and so I have enjoyed her descriptive settings and the associated mysteries she has placed in the numerous parks. I have usually felt like I was right there in the middle of the action - (gee, I couldn't read and get out of the caves in Blind Descent fast enough, they felt so real!)
But this book seemed like it was written for a different purpose altogether. I never felt a true sense of Isle Royale National Park. (Superior Death was much better at that.) I never felt a connection with the action or characters - they seemed to be one-dimensional, where usually Nevada Barr has such depth to her characetrs. I even skimmed the middle 170 pages and still got the whole story that she had there.
This could have been a much shorter novel for the story she was telling here. (It could have been the same length if she had gone into better depth of action and character).
The covert agenda wasn't necessary either. When I got to the first part of it, I almost stopped right there. It would have been the first novel of hers I hadn't finished.
I have always waited for each new novel in high anticipation. She needs to go back to what worked. Very disappointing.