Product Description

Anna Pigeon returns—in the remarkable new novel from the New York Times–bestselling writer.

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 their own pack of the magnificent, much-maligned animals. She’s housed 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 each winter—effectively bringing an end to the fifty-year study—so that it can be manned to secure the scrap of border with Canada.

Soon after Anna’s arrival, the wolf packs under observation begin to act 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 team 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 also her own survival.

Filled with the nail-biting suspense, richly drawn characters and gorgeous nature writing that are her hallmarks, Winter Study is vintage Barr, proving once again that she’s “a real writer, in every sense of the word” (The Denver Post).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14515 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 370 pages

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.)
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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

Review
“STRONG, EVOCATIVE WRITING…frigid winds blow through Winter Study as the suspense heats up.”
—SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

“Barr skillfully uses archetypal images of the wolf to deepen the suspense.”
—WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

“Fast-paced, intricately plotted, and filled with foreboding.”
—ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS

“Riveting.”
—MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

Customer Reviews

scared stiff
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.

Tense drama in an isolated setting
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.

Excellent "closed door" whodunit
District Ranger Anna Pigeon of Rocky Mountains National Park is going to have wolves in the park; to know what to expect she is sent to Isle Royale in Lake Superior where scientists have been studying the wolves in their natural habitat for fifty years. They can work without tourists around as the park is closed for several moths due to dangerous weather. Homeland Security would like the park opened year round as it is on the Canadian border; they send Bob Menchinn to determine the feasibility.

Strange things are happening on the isolated island beginning with Anna's first night there. A group of seven wolves walk by the cabin where Anna and the winter study group resides. This anomaly shakes everyone as wolves normally avoid humans. Anna sees a giant wolf almost twice the size of a normal sized wolf and humongous paw prints. They think it is a wolf/dog hybrid and soon afterward an assistant is mauled to death by the wolves, which have no reported history of assaulting humans. The words "help me" appear on an ice coated window. Anna knows something is wrong and begins investigating just before another scientist disappears in what looks like a kidnapping; making her inquiries even more urgent.

A new Anna Pigeon mystery is a treat for fans of the series who expect the best from Nevada Barr and gets it with this strong "closed door" whodunit in a wintry outdoors setting. As Anna digs into the lives of the scientists and their aides, she uncovers dark secrets and blackmail, hidden agendas and ties to a cold (pun intended) case. Readers will enjoy armchair trekking with Anna as she seeks the truth allegedly of a killer wolf stalking humans.

Harriet Klausner