When national park ranger Anna Pigeon needs to find peace, she turns to nature for solace. Lucky for her, she’s been newly assigned to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.
Anna is enthralled by its ruins: the ancient cliff dwellings of a vanished Native American civilisation.
But Anna’s reverie is shattered by an inexplicable illness affecting visitors to the popular landmark – and two mysterious tragedies: the death of a child… and the murder of a friend.
Now she must find the very human source of the evil wind that is blowing through the ruins. For it threatens more innocent lives – including Anna’s own…

‘Ill Wind‘ is the third mystery featuring Law Enforcement Park Ranger, Anna Pigeon. In the first book, ‘Track Of The Cat‘ she was working in the heat of the  Guadalupe Mountains National Park in West Texas. In the second book ‘A Superior Death‘ she was working on and under the water in Isle Royale National Park on the coast of Lake Superior. This time she’s working in almost museum-like atmosphere of the Mesa Verde National Park amongst the elaborate cave dwellings that the Anasazi lived in for 700 years before apparently abandoning them for reasons that are still hotly debated.

Wherever Anna works, you know somebody will wind up dead and she will have to risk life and limb to discover who the killer is. I have no problem with the formula as, Nevada Barr always brings whatever Park Anna is working in alive and gives me an insider’s view of how the Park Service works and she also keeps deepening my understanding of Anna Pigeon, a woman whom I’m enjoying getting to know.

I visited the Mesa Verde National Park around the time this novel was published, so Nevada Barr’s descriptions of the place revived some memories for me..

I wouldn’t have thought of Mesa Verde as a dangerous place to be either a Ranger or a visitor but Nevada Barr has produced a mystery that plausibly places everyone at risk. It’s a solid mystery that was made livlier by Barr’s decision to bring back the Columbo-like FBI agent that Anna worked with in the last book, ‘A Superior Death‘.

I enjoyed the mystery, especially the action-packed conclusion but it was the continuing development of Anna’s character that made the book for me. I loved Anna’s very human reaction to the death of a friend. She’s not hard-boiled although she is pragmatic, sceptical, has low inclusion needs and has little time for social niceties. As a widow, she’s too well acquainted with grief and that’s what surfaces when she’s confronted with a friend’s corpse. She doesn’t flip into detective mode, She drags herself through the crime scene mechanics and then gets blackout drunk. 

I admire the way Nevada Barr controls the pace of her novels. The beginning gets me involved with the place and with the changes in Anna’s life while introducing key characters. The middle sets up the mystery and has Anna trying to pull things together. The last third of book is action-packed and suspenseful,. This isn’t the kind of book where the cleverer-than-everyone-else detective gathers the suspects in a room and displas their deductive brilliance. This is the kind of book that keeps you guessing almost until the end and culminates in violent confrontations that put Anna at risk.

I had a lot of fun with the book and I’m already looking forward to reading the next book. ‘Firestorm‘. set in northern California in the winter.