This series has a strong start. Barr utilizes carefully terse prose that still paints an evocative picture of the beauty of West Texas and then follows it with several paragraphs detailing mysterious animal scat in all its glory. We meet Anna Pigeon, who has left what seems to be a relatively lucrative life in New York City to become a law enforcement ranger at Guadalupe Mountains National Park. She seems to enjoy creating a running commentary to the wildlife during her patrols.

A tarantula the size of a woman’s hands, the most horrifying of gentle creatures, wandered slowly across Anna’s path. “As a Park Ranger I will protect and serve you.” She talked to the creature from a safe three yards away. “But we’ll never be friends. Is that going to be a problem?”

The tarantula stopped, its front pair of legs feeling the air. Then it turned and walked slowly toward her, each of its legs appearing to move independently of the other seven.

“Yes. I see that it is.”

This is all within the first twenty pages. I didn’t even know what the mystery was (though I was banking on murder, because it‘s always murder), but I immediately loved Anna. Anna, who upon further inspection, has some serious emotional problems in the way that pretty much every fictional LEO/PI protagonist does.

Anna has more compassion for the animals around her than most of the humans she meets. Her psychiatrist sister Molly characterizes Anna’s mixed feelings about the death of a fellow ranger as rage against a miscarriage of justice. It may be true, but based on the way she interacts with nearly all people in this book, I am not convinced that if it were a human being falsely accused instead of a mountain lion that Anna would be quite so focused. Her interest in the lions & their wellbeing is the impetus for her initial investigation.

The way Anna observes people is quite clinical, from their appearances to what she perceives as their motivations; rarely is there any substantial emotion attached to as single person. Just idle thoughts. She doesn’t even show a single ounce of upset at her own logical suspicion of Rogelio as a potential murder suspect, despite their connection (she’s been sleeping with this dude for some time, though reading between the lines makes him sound tiresome). This impersonal viewpoint may be an extension of her grief over the loss of her husband Josh who was killed under unspecified circumstances. Or maybe she’s always been this way. We may never know, except to see if Anna evolves in the next novels. We find out, at least, that her disinclination toward making close friends seems to stem from said aforementioned trauma - Anna knows “that she [wears] her loneliness like armor … to the casual observer it looked very like arrogance.”

The mystery itself ended up being less important to me than the exploration of who Anna is through her investigative progress and a crash course on how some national parks function. Still, I enjoyed the ending confrontation immensely - Anna is a motherfucking boss, regardless of her flaws.

… she saw trails of black on her hands: blood. It seeped down from her throat, dripped to the ground. Anna chose not to worry about it. Had an artery been severed, she’d be dead by now. Next time she was in town she could get her rabies booster.

NEW THINGS I LEARNED: