Blind Descent

A would-be killer is drawing Anna Pigeon deep into the darkness -- and closer to Hell than she's ever gone before.

"Anna Pigeon, the intrepid National Park Service ranger in Nevada Barr's superb wilderness mysteries, has had some perilous experiences 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-eating 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 rivers, 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 an 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."

A close friend has been seriously injured in a freak rock slide, and has asked for Anna Pigeon by name. So the summoned park ranger fights back her paralyzing claustrophobia and joins the rescue crew on a terrifying journey into Lechuguilla -- a monstrous, death-black labyrinth of yawning subterranean canyons and narrow crawlspaces in New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns. But when she hears the wounded caver whisper, "It wasn't an accident", and a second "mishap" leaves a broken corpse crushed on the cavern floor, Anna is horrified to realize that there is a murderer among them in this isolated and strangely beautiful underground world. Now her devotion to justice -- and to her own survival has set her on a hunt for a killer that is leading Anna deeper into the darkness...and nearer to Hell than she's ever gone before.