When the body of Doyce Barnett turns up in unsavory circumstances in
Mississippi's Natchez Trace National Park, district ranger Anna Pigeon
finds her investigation stymied at every turn. The dead man's brother, an
undertaker with a secret that's been kept by three generations of his
family, will do anything to protect it, even if his cover-up puts Anna's
life in danger. Her own deputy, jealous because she got the job he wanted,
seems to be sabotaging her case in order to advance his political
ambitions. A bunch of Mississippi good old boys who've been poaching on
park territory are gunning for her, and something strange is going on in a
slave cemetery that's also in her bailiwick.
In this, her 10th outing, the prickly, ever-likable Ranger Pigeon puts all
the pieces together in a lively, well-paced mystery that evokes two
dimensions of the Deep South: its lush beauty and its tangled racial
history, dimensions that, as Anna herself puts it, are "both a balm.
History because its sins had already been committed, nature because she
was supremely indifferent to the petty hysterias of the human race."