Anna Pigeon comes face to face with the dark side of humanity.
This summer's backpack read of choice is the latest national park mystery from Nevada Barr, whose gumshoe ranger Anna Pigeon has been cracking cases in the wilderness for more than a decade."
-Outside, on High Country
Just three days after her wedding to Sheriff Paul Davidson, Anna Pigeon moves from Mississippi to Colorado to assume her new post as district ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park, where three girls have disappeared during a religious retreat. Two of the children reappear a month later, clad only in filthy underwear and claiming to remember nothing of the intervening weeks. The girls are frightened and traumatized, but they forge a bond with the campers who discover them-a wheelchair-bound paraplegic and her elderly aunt.
With the reappearance of the children comes an odd and unsettling presence in the park, a sense of disembodied evil and unspeakable terrors: small animals are found mercilessly slaughtered, and a sinister force seems to still control the girls. As Anna investigates, she finds herself
caught up in the machinations of a paranoid religious sect bent on protecting its secrets and keeping the girls sequestered from law enforcement and psychiatric help.
Following the trail of the many suspects, especially that of the cult's intense youth-group leader, Anna comes to find the force against which the children's minds have been broken. This evil has the eyes of a visionary and the soul of the devil. Anna will discover the truth-even if it kills her.
Nevada Barr is the award-winning author of twelve previous Anna Pigeon mysteries, including the New York Times bestsellers Hunting Season and High Country, as well as Seeking Enlightenment. . . Hat by Hat, a work of nonfiction. She lives in Mississippi, where she was most recently a ranger on the Natchez Trace Parkway.
