Former actress-turned-national parks ranger Nevada Barr has forged a literary career for herself as the creator of the entertaining and much praised Anna Pigeon mystery novels. "What lifts the [series] far above most of the other contemporary amateur sleuths mysteries is Barr's exquisite writing--it swoops, soars, sails, then catches you unawares beneath the heart and takes your breath away," wrote a Cleveland Plain Dealer reviewer. "Like the parks and monuments she writes of, Nevada Barr should be declared a national treasure," echoed the Bloomsbury Review.

Writing in a 1995 edition of the magazine Armchair Detective, Dorman T. Shindler observed that Barr "comes by her love of the outdoors and her penchant for an adventurous lifestyle quite naturally. Raised within sight of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, she is the child of a mother who . . . ferried airplanes during World War II, and a father whose background included employment as a...