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A Superior Death (Anna Pigeon Mysteries Book 2) by [Nevada Barr]

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Nevada Barr

A Superior Death (Anna Pigeon Mysteries Book 2) Kindle Edition

by Nevada Barr (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Book 2 of 19: Anna Pigeon Mysteries

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Park ranger Anna Pigeon returns, in a mystery that unfolds in and around Lake Superior, in whose chilling depths sunken treasure comes with a deadly price. In her latest mystery, Nevada Barr sends Ranger Pigeon to a new post amid the cold, deserted, and isolated beauty of Isle Royale National Park, a remote island off the coast of Michigan known for fantastic deep-water dives of wrecked sailing vessels. Leaving behind memories of the Texas high desert and the environmental scam she helped uncover, Anna is adjusting to the cool damp of Lake Superior and the spirits and lore of the northern Midwest. But when a routine application for a diving permit reveals a grisly underwater murder, Anna finds herself 260 feet below the forbidding surface of the lake, searching for the connection between a drowned man and an age-old cargo ship. Written with a naturalist's feel for the wilderness and a keen understanding of characters who thrive in extreme conditions, A Superior Death is a passionate, atmospheric page-turner.

Print length

324 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Berkley
Publication date

September 2, 2003
Reading age

18 years and up
File size

1992 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A wonderful satisfying read." -- -- Washington Post Book World

"Haunting. . .Wonderful. . .Vivid and Memorable. . .A Book That Is Just About Perfect." -- -- Denver Post

"Nevada Barr writes with a cool, steady hand about the violence of nature and the cruelty of man." -- -- The New York Times Book Review --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In her second appearance, after Track of the Cat , National Park Service ranger Anna Pigeon is posted to an island in Lake Superior, where her interest in wildlife is fully engaged by the local population of humans. Two scuba-diving tourists exploring an old, submerged wreck discover a recent addition: the body of Denny Castle, who ran a commercial diving concession in the park. This makes Anna uneasy about the mysterious disappearance of Donna Butkus, wife of fellow ranger Scotty Butkus. Hawk Bradshaw, who worked with Denny, suggests that there was a link between Denny and Donna, but Hawk is less revealing about the nature of the relationship he and his twin sister had with the dead man and the impact Denny's recent marriage (to yet another woman) had on it. The Bradshaws aren't the only reticent ones here; indeed, Barr's characters hide enough unsavory secrets to keep a soap opera humming for months. Despite the wealth of personal intrigue, FBI agent Frederic Stanton looks for a drug connection to the murder: "I'm all for drugs . . . Takes the guesswork out of law enforcement." The levelheaded Anna is again a treat as she and a couple of minor characters whose lives don't verge on melodrama keep the story from floundering on the rocks. Mystery Guild alternate; paperback rights to Avon.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

YA-Transferring to a ranger position at Isle Royale National Park in Michigan, Anna Pigeon misses the Texas sun and heat of her former park. She cringes at the damp, penetrating cold that accompanies the foggy, gray days on Lake Superior. She swaps her horse for a boat but continues to be surrounded by dead bodies in her second mystery. The strange corpse she encounters on her new job is that of a well-known diver. She finds it in the engine room of a ship that sank at the turn of the century with the five original crew still aboard. Those corpses have been preserved by the frigid lake waters and are a grim "tourist attraction" for scuba divers. As Anna seeks the identity of the killer, she is never far from the northern woods, characterized by their earthy scents, lingering midday chill, and multitude of flora and fauna. While detecting, she tries to sort out her feelings about life, her status as a widow, and her need for solitude interspersed with friendships. She is a captivating, daredevil detective whose adventures will delight mystery readers.
Pam Spencer, Thomas Jefferson Sci-Tech, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Texas park ranger Anna Pigeon (Track of the Cat, 1993) proves she's much more than a regional specialist when she's reassigned to the frigid North Shore of Lake Superior and hears two divers' tales of finding six bodies in the Kamloops, a sunken 1927 wreck where there are supposed to be only five. Who could've killed dive concessionaire Denny Castle on his honeymoon night--and what was he doing down there anyway? With his on-again-off-again lover Donna Butkus missing (her ranger husband Scotty's story that she's visiting her sick sister is no match for flaky Tinker and Damien Coggins-Clarke's accusation that he's killed and eaten her), the field is almost too rich: his young widow Jo, aggrieved Scotty, Denny's diving partners (and heirs) Hawk and Holly Bradshaw, whatever mysterious man innkeeper Patience Bradshaw's daughter Carrie Ann is making time with--all of them with variously guilty secrets of their own. But the final revelation of culprit and motive will surprise all but the most alert readers. A crackling good mystery, fleshed out by a detective and a supporting cast far more human than they need to be. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Navada Barr is the award-winning author of seven Anna Pigeon mysteries: Track of the Cat, A Superior Death, III Wind, Firestorm, Endangered Species, Blind Descent, and Liberty Falling. She lives in Mississippi and was most recent a ranger on the Natchez Trace Parkway --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Barr has written an intriguing if unusual story that successfully combines a refreshing enthusiasm for nature, an impassioned entreaty for environmental awareness, and an engrossing murder mystery. Leaving Texas to take a job in northern Michigan, park ranger Anna Pigeon soon becomes involved in a puzzling murder involving a drowned diver and a mysterious shipwreck. Her investigation puts her in touch with some odd characters, including Pizza Dave, who's as large as a small tractor, and Holly and Hawk, a brother and sister dive team whose love for the briny deep hides a dark secret. Between extracting fish hooks from the limbs of amateur fishermen, instructing naive tourists about the local wildlife, and corralling drunken boaters, Anna puts her considerable skills toward solving the puzzle of who killed the diver and why. Barr, a park ranger, provides plenty of authentic details about life in the great outdoors, and her deft plotting and appealingly quirky characters give her story plenty of punch. Anna Pigeon is tough-minded, strong, sensitive, vulnerable, and funny. Emily Melton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

ASIN : B0024CEY3G
Publisher : Berkley (September 2, 2003)
Publication date : September 2, 2003
Language : English
File size : 1992 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 324 pages
Lending : Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #41,076 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #545 in Amateur Sleuth Mysteries (Kindle Store)
- #1,477 in Amateur Sleuths
- #1,721 in Crime Thrillers (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
500 ratings

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5 star		56%
4 star		30%
3 star		10%
2 star		3%
1 star		1%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Pat Goltz

An improvement

Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2018

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Track of the Cat, which I reviewed earlier, was heavy on preaching. This novel is not. Such opinions are at a minimum. So at least that was an improvement. I did find a pattern in the path of the two stories. The first half is really slow, no real action, just a lot of details. An exciting event happens mid-novel. Then slow again until the very end. If you aren't patient, she will lose you. Most people reading this literary genre expect more action.

I enjoyed some of her unique metaphors, sprinkled here and there. For example, "she...let the silver of the evening sink into her soul", of boys illegally throwing frisbees in the park, she said that she would not cite them because she did not want to interfere in other people's practice of their religion. Or this: "The sky had cried itself out the night before and smiled down clear and warm." Along with short but vivid descriptions, naming species, of the vegetation and animals, to someone familiar with the region, which I am not, this would evoke a strong sense of reality, of connecting with the story, the events.

However, about 40 pages from the end, when the second action event began, she completely lost me as far as reality is concerned. Turning the heroine into Wonder Woman, doing what is probably physically impossible, especially given her lack of experience, is doggone jarring and disruptive of the story.

And it would be nice if the reader had a smidgen's chance of figuring out who the villain was before she sprung this on the reader out of the blue. The evidence needed to figure this out simply was not presented in context.

3 people found this helpful

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C. O'leary

A Superior Death

Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2019

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It had been a while since I’d read any of Barr’s Anna Pigeon books and realized I’d missed this 2nd book in the series. Now I remember my chief complaint: Pigeon takes unbelievable risks and isn’t that smart about it, she survives unbelievable situations, and in some cases, the endings are too neatly put together. The redeeming factor in this novel was the interesting descriptions of the waterways and islands of Isle Royale National Park. It’s an interesting read, but I didn’t love it.

3 people found this helpful

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GaryE

Really enjoyable book

Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2020

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Only the second book in the series but I’ve found a new series to thoroughly enjoy. My days of hiking through the woods and remote camping are long behind me but it’s still an ideal I cling to. Theses books are a great outLet for that.

I’m looking forward to the next book!

One person found this helpful

Helpful

A tense diving story

Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2014

Verified Purchase

In this book Anna Pigeon takes a job at a national Park on Lake Superior. She misses the hot dry air of Texas – and her horse. A boat is no substitute for a companionable animal. But Anna handles her boat quite well, and does fine with her first deep water drive too. She's part of a crew going down to retrieve a body some tourists spotted in a sunken ship.

What I like about Anna is that she never shirks anything. She'll cheerfully retrieve a dead body, answer an SOS call on a foggy night with no back up, grapple with a miscreant twice her size, or throw herself into a dive that she knows could kill her.

Anna, although a loner in most ways, has a certain talent for friendship. I loved her gossipy conversations with the blind dispatcher who knows everything that's going on in the park. She has a charming relationship with the secretary from her last posting. And Anna’s long distance conversations with her sister Molly are very entertaining. Anna drinks too much, Molly smokes too much, and both worry about the other’s self-destructive behavior.

The murder mystery is quite complex. There are so many scandalous shenanigans going on among park personnel and associates, that Anna is hard pressed to discover which scandal will lead her to a suspect. The FBI agent on the scene complicates matters in an interesting way.

The underwater denouement was almost too tense to bear. But I got through it – to order the next book in the series. I'm finding these books addictive.

5 people found this helpful

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J. Nachison

A deep dive into a great lake

Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2021

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Anna gets damaged again in "A Superior Death", as it seems she does in most of Nevada Barr's novels about the NPS law enforcement ranger; if she was a real person, she'd look Frankensteinian by now, all the times she's been gashed and smashed. Still, her character is always good company, and Barr is pretty brilliant about evoking the atmosphere of the national parks where Anna does her rangering, and about making the murders in her mysteries appropriate to the surroundings. I've read three or four of the novels to date, and I plan on tackling the whole series when I can.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Regency Belle

Enjoyable Read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 16, 2018

Verified Purchase

Found a copy of an Anna Pigeon book in a local charity shop and I decided to download the first two books in the series. They are a good read, providing an element of crime solving, beautiful USA landscapes and an interesting character - the widowed Anna.

I will download the other books in the series as they remind me a little of the Joe Picket books by CJ Box. The National Parks background, the development of a character, their friends and family are similar but Anna is a far gentler character, who is still trying to come to terms with the loss of her husband.

None of the extremes of Joe Picket but both are fascinating people, who work in amazing locations. I loved Anna for her feminist qualities, her relationships with Molly, her NYC based sister and with her strong female best friend - Christine. I truly enjoyed reading about her thought processes, how her brain collates information, digests it, then utilises her ability to “read” the emotions and foibles of others to solve the puzzles in her life.

Off now to read book three in the series.

Robin G.

Murder in the great lakes USA

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 3, 2018

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This was a good story from start to finish. It was set on Lake superior on the US side in a national park Belle isle.The characterisation was excellent and varied . A murder occurred in unusual circumstances and other possible murders were discussed and investigated. I liked the main character Anna Pigeon . In the series she moves on to other national parks so the character offers a wider range than the Tec in A-Z murders.

Jo Patrick

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 2, 2017

Verified Purchase

Great series

ZOWEECAT

One of the best

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 28, 2013

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This is one of my favourites. My paperback is falling to bits so good to have it on Kindle. Interesting introduction to Frederick. I loved Oscar the heroic bear - now part human. I'd like to see more of him and his companions.

bop3

Three Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 19, 2015

Verified Purchase

writing a bit heavy going but a good story.

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