New Anna Pigeon mystery tackles online harassment
In “Boar Island,” the 19th book in Nevada Barr’s best-selling Anna Pigeon series, Anna has been tapped to temporarily act as chief ranger of Acadia National Park, a 47,000-acre coastal recreation area in Maine.
As a seasoned ranger, Anna settles into her chief role with ease, but not everyone is happy she is poking around the rocky beaches and lush forests.
Anna has two mysteries to untangle while she’s in Maine — finding the source of a vicious social media campaign against her 16-year-old goddaughter and solving the murder of an infamous lobsterman — and someone is willing to go to murderous lengths to keep Anna from the truth.
Seeking protection from her online harasser, Anna’s goddaughter, Elizabeth Dwayne, and her mother, Heath Jarrod, move into a family friend’s crumbling mansion on Boar Island for a few weeks. The island is loosely based on Bear Island, a real island off Northeast Harbor, Maine — just south of where Anna has been stationed.
With Elizabeth, Barr explores a new source of anxiety for teenage girls. Although public shaming is nothing new, the digital world can help bullies remain anonymous:
“‘We haven’t a clue as to who is behind it,’ Anna said. ‘So we have no way to make it stop. Nobody to come down on. We don’t have a motive. We don’t, do we, Elizabeth?’ The adults again stared at the teenager in her PJs like hawks at a baby duckling.
“‘No,’ Elizabeth said sadly. ‘At school everybody likes me, or I don’t even know them. You know how it is. There’s a bunch of boys who make a game of getting girls to have sex with them, and they keep score. They’re creeps, and they’ve done some creepy things — you know, posting about the girls who put out, and even meaner posts about the ones that didn’t.’ ”
Series readers will recognize Elizabeth and Heath from Barr’s “Hard Truth” (2005) and “Destroyer Angel” (2014). The character of Heath, who became paraplegic after a climbing fall, has given Barr a greater appreciation for diversity of physical abilities, both in her novels and in life.
“I’ve fallen in love with Heath, as have some of my readers,” she said. “In working with a couple of disabled folks — one a sailor in Minnesota, the other a woman I met at a speaking engagement in Boulder — I became enamored with the creativity engendered when a person is challenged.”
As for the murderer, there is a widely held belief that the most believable antagonists are the ones who truly believe they are heroes — and in “Boar Island,” Barr hits that nail on the head.
“I think, in this one, I have spent more time and thought on the way the crime unfolds in the mind of the criminal than I have in previous books,” she said. “It’s a story not only of the crime, and the solving of the mystery of the crime, but the mystery of the development of the criminal thinking behind it.”
If Barr’s descriptions of park procedures and policies feel credible, it’s because she spent time as a park ranger in Mississippi, Michigan, Texas and Colorado. Her lavish descriptions of landscapes lend an almost gothic feel: “Anna stood at the edge of Thunder Hole, a favorite tourist spot. A keyholeshaped inlet in the granite cliffs forced waves into a narrow aperture, creating wondrous booming thunder and geysers of silver spray, some a hundred feet high.” And though alternating points of view and two nonintersecting plot lines may be confusing for readers at times, Anna acts as a keystone holding the story together as she works to solve the mysteries.