Author has a wonderful way to share the experiences of living and working in the US National Parks. Delightful characters and easy to relate to. ( )

Anna Pidgeon - 11 ( )

This was fairly creepy. Anna is assigned to this island to take over from the now hospitalized former head Ranger. She thinks it’s great at first, even though her sparkling water is always flat. She is enjoying the water and the fort and the air when a fellow ranger turns up missing. His wife flips out and they search. They find his boat eventually. It’s been blown up and they find his shoes and his duty belt on the ocean floor near the wreckage. Nearby is another wrecked boat, blown up by its own extra fuel tanks. But why the extra fuel? What were they running?

Meanwhile, Anna sees a ghost and has some other weird experiences. She thinks they are induced by the heat and the fact that she’s reading her great-great-great aunt’s diaries of the time she spent on that very island, during the Civil War. The dead ancestor was the wife of the fort commander. The fort had been turned into a prison camp for Confederate soldiers. The sister of the aunt falls for one of the soldiers who is brutally beaten for suggesting that John Wilkes Booth wasn’t such a bad guy.

But Anna’s visions aren’t the result of fevered reading in tropical nights. Someone is dosing her with LSD. That’s why her water is always flat. The same thing happened to the other ranger. The boat that exploded was scooping out places to land for Cuban refugee smuggling. She can’t figure out who it is, but it turns out to be a person she least expected because he saved her life when she was caught in a wreck during a dive.

Also, Anna accepts Paul’s proposal of marriage. Damn. Like other heroes and heroines who have gone before her, I bet she loses her edge and her appeal.

This one never really came together for me. The flashbacks and the present just didn't work. ( )

I've enjoyed all 11 of Barr's Anna Pigeon mystery novels set at National Parks. This one set in the Dry Tortugas National Park was particularly interesting because it told the story through alternating chapters set today and during the Civil War. We've been wanting to visit this island 70 miles off Key West in the Gulf of Mexico. ( )