Anna Pigeon returnsin 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 wintereffectively bringing an end to the fifty-year studyso 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).

"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.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"For much of Nevada Barr's 14th Anna Pigeon mystery, it's not a question of who-, why- or howdunit, but of whether a crime has been committed at all. No body shows up until almost halfway through the novel, and even then how can you hold a wild animal guilty? As Anna remarks, 'However vicious an animal attack, it was neither a sin nor a crime.'

That animal is a wolf — the subject... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) of a 50-year-old 'Winter Study' of wolf-moose relations in Isle Royale National Park off Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Park Ranger Pigeon was stationed here one summer early in her career (see Barr's second novel, 'A Superior Death'), but the off-season proves a different world: bitter cold, lashed with snow, forlorn in its isolation. Sharing a single generator are a quartet of devoted researchers and a pair of scientists dispatched by Homeland Security to consider shutting down the study, downsizing research and beefing up security 'to better protect the border from terrorists.' Amid clashing personalities and conflicting agendas, the atmosphere indoors grows nearly as frosty as the air outside, and the tension ratchets up a few more notches when the wolves abandon their routines, boldly enter human territory and stalk the team. Oversized tracks appear; unrecognized DNA shows up in wolf scat; the mystery deepens. 'It's like wolf plus ... something,' says one scientist ominously, and after the first death, no one feels safe.

One might label this book 'Hound of the Baskervilles' meets 'And Then There Were None' meets a Michael Crichton novel, and the narrative itself references works ranging from 'Little Red Riding Hood' to 'The Shining.' But this is a Nevada Barr book through and through, with its careful examination of how humans interact with the natural world, its infectious fascination with nature in general and those dense, resonant descriptions: 'Desperate earth-starved trees poked skeletal branches through the snow cover, black arthritic fingers reaching for a sky that was the same color as the grave they sank their roots in.' Barr skillfully uses archetypal images of the wolf — myths, fairy tales and more — to deepen the suspense: wolf at the door, wolf in sheep's clothing, werewolves among us. But Pigeon knows that 'wolves' reputation as cold-blooded killers of little girls in red capes was unearned,' and ultimately it's not the wolf out there that's frightening, but the more sinister human nearby.

Art Taylor is currently teaching a course in American detective fiction at George Mason University."

Reviewed by Art Taylor, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

The bestselling author of "Hard Truth" and "Bittersweet" brings back Ranger Anna Pigeon in the 14th installment of her acclaimed mystery series.

Anna Pigeon returnsain the remarkable new novel from the New York Timesabestselling writer. Soon after Annaas 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 sheas aa real writer, in every sense of the worda (The Denver Post).

Nevada Barr is the award-winning author of thirteen previous Anna Pigeon mysteries, including the New York Times bestsellers Hard Truth and High Country.