Anna Pigeon, the intredpid National Park Service ranger in Nevada Barr's superb wilderness mysteries, ahs had some perilous experienced in the five novels that preceded "Blind Descent", but none compares with this thrilling subterranean adventure in the underground caverns of Lechuguilla, a "monster man-eatting cave" in New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns. When a fellow ranger is injured in a caving accident, Anna chokes back the willies of claustrophobia and joins the rescue team. Burrowing 800 feet below ground, she negotiates airless tunnels, gaping pits, vaulting caverns, and silently flowing fivers, each hazard with a daunting name like Razor Blade Run or the Wormhole. At the end of the dangerous descent, she reaches her friend and hears her say, "It wasn't and accident."
Barr's descriptions of this Stygian underworld-so beautiful, so mysterious and so treacherous-have a stunning visceral quality, largely because of her heroine's affinity with the natural world. Strong, independent and proud of it, Anna is less appreciative of nature's higher orders. ('If she had a tail,' she says of her edgy encounter with another caver, 'it would have been lashing.') Her abrasiveness may blind anna to the subtler signals of human behavior, but alone in the darkness, she can see clear to the heart of the matter.
Barr's descriptions of this Stygian underworld-so beautiful, so mysterious and so treacherous-have a stunning visceral quality, largely because of her heroine's affinity with the natural world. Strong, independent and proud of it, Anna is less appreciative of nature's higher orders. ('If she had a tail,' she says of her edgy encounter with another caver, 'it would have been lashing.') Her abrasiveness may blind anna to the subtler signals of human behavior, but alone in the darkness, she can see clear to the heart of the matter.
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