A Superior Death

Nevada Barr

Deep in Lake Superior — at Michigan’s Isle Royale National Park — is the wreck of the SS Kamloops, a freighter that sank with all hands in 1927. The ship was lost to time, then rediscovered 50 years later, lying on its starboard side at the foot of an underwater cliff. Inside are the remains of five sailors, preserved by the frigid water and ‘translucent as wraiths.’

That atmospheric, unusual setting is the crime scene in this action-packed installment in the Anna Pigeon mysteries, a series of 19 books that take our intrepid heroine to National Parks across the United States: Carlsbad Caverns, Ellis Island, Lassen Volcanic National Park, Maine’s Acadia, Glacier in Montana.

Anna is a park ranger and investigator, simultaneously vulnerable, courageous, and physically resilient. Hyper-capable on the job, she can hike for hours, drive a boat, dive deep in a lake, climb mountains, fire a gun, and go toe-to-toe with sexist coworkers. But she’s not invincible nor impervious to pain, both physical and emotional. She’s run away to the wilderness after the death of her husband in New York City.

Fairly new to Isle Royale, Anna finds herself at the helm of a tricky investigation. After a recreational dive to the Kamloops, two vacationers return topside with an unsettling report: They saw six bodies in the wreck, not five. Soon Anna and her team realize they’ve got a murder on their hands, and there are plenty of suspects. They’ve also got a missing person, a super aggro Park Ranger, a troubled teenager, raucous families on holiday, and rumors about the mythological wendigo prowling the woods.

Part crime procedural, part adventure story, this book cooks along at a good clip with plenty of this-could-go-either-way peril, snappy dialogue, and glorious descriptions of beautiful scenery (that might also kill you). When the final showdown arrives, it’s very tense and extremely well-earned.

Hoping to combat fear with knowledge, she’d spent her first two weeks as North Shore Ranger creeping about, chart in one hand, wheel in the other, her head hanging out of the window like a dog’s from a pickup truck. She had memorized the shape of every bluff, every bay, the location of every shoal and underwater hazard. On still, sunny days when the lake was more likely to forgive mistakes, she blanked her windows with old maps and crawled from place to place, eyes glued to the radar screen, ears tuned to the clatter of the depth finder. Like most landlubbers, she was less afraid of shallow waters— coves full of stones and half-submerged logs—than she was of deep. Though the brutal cold of Superior would drown her a quarter of a mile from shore just as mercilessly as it would ten miles out, Anna seldom came in from open water without a sense of returning to safety. ‘Safe harbor’ — a phrase she’d heard bandied about since childhood — had been given a depth of meaning with Lake Superior’s first angry glance. — Nevada Barr

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