Anna Pidgeon - 4 ( )

Certainly Anna Pigeon has the patience of a saint. There are assholes galore in this one. My patience with them would have run out, but Anna stays to the higher ground and comes up the winner every time. Not to say she doesn’t pay the price sometimes.

In this one everyone on the mountain is a suspect. But who is covering up for whom? They all had to take shelter in these tent-like things that would protect them from the worst of the heat and smoke – hilariously called shake-n-bakes. A few people witnessed others coming out of their shake-n-bakes, but not everyone. So Anna has to try to ask people questions without giving away so much that she becomes a victim herself.

Turns out that the sister of the hiker killed when his fire caused the forest blaze is covering for her brother’s lover. The guy who was killed actually started the forest fire to give people work. Without logging, a lot of people make their living fighting fires. So he tells people to set them and takes bribes by the fire fighters groups for starting them. He tried to get this guy to light one but he refused. So the asshole killed him and tried to make it look like it the guy set it on purpose or an accident so stupid that the guy would have been embarrassed posthumously. So the lover finds out and knife’s the guy.

Anna takes pity on him when she is trapped and about to fall into a boiling sulfur lake. She puts a plan to him that he accepts. He had been fighting with this real asshole who has now been rendered unconscious. The killer hauls Anna out and escapes. When the asshole comes to, she tells him that he rescued her and got a bump on the head for his efforts. The fleeing killer fell into the sulfur lake and died immediately. Because a head injury case often doesn’t remember the few minutes leading up to the injury, she knew she could plant a fake memory there that he would cherish forever because he was a pompous ass. The last scene we see is Anna and the sister flying over the area in a helicopter and Anna surreptitiously points out to the sister a small figure way in the distance making his way away from civilization.

An interesting ending. Very different.

#4 Anna Pigeon (national park ranger) mystery, this one is set in the mountains of California where Anna is serving as a medic at a firefighting station. With the wildfire under control and the various teams about to disband, a sudden front with excessive winds reignites the fire and sends a firestorm down the mountain, trapping Anna and a dozen others. Everyone survives the firestorm—except one man, who is found stabbed to death in his fire shelter. The man was not well-liked—in fact, he was positively obnoxious. But who among them had all of The Big Three—Motive, Means and Opportunity? It’s up to Anna, with minimal communication with the outside world, to figure it out. I enjoyed this much more than the previous Anna Pigeon book, which I read several months ago and which almost caused me to give up on this series. I’m glad now that I didn’t! The only thing missing from this book is Anna’s usual phone conversation with her sister Molly, a gruff, chain-smoking psychiatrist in New York. ( )

Another good mystery featuring Anna Pigeon. This one is centered around some deaths at a fire-lookout station up in the mountains. ( )