Gain Access Destroyer Angel (Anna Pigeon, #18) Devised By Nevada Barr Accessible In Digital Version

Usually I really enjoy the Anna Pigeon mysteries, I just didn't find this one very interesting, It dragged and too much time was spent with the nonAnna characters, Nevertheless, here are quotes I appreciated:
"The only earth the meek inherited was six feet down and capped by a stone",
"When it came to fundamental criminal activities, Charles doubted if he could steal a peek at a nudist camp",
"The air was a delicate balance, The last summer rested on the skin as the prickle of coming winter brushed the mind",
"Money was like sugar too much of it sickened people",
"They needed to believe the impossible: that there was an end to suffering, that their emptiness would be filled, That they were loved".
"Tracking everything from grizzly bears to skunks, she'd become convinced animals could sense a clamorous mind, People, not so much".
"On a canvas of exposed roots and rocks, firelight painted a stairway that might have been done on one of Dali's bad days",
"either liked the look or hadn't bothered to update his perception in thirty years",
"It was more like the sound Heath imagined when characters in Dickens's books said, 'Harrumph'",
"Time and life were the only true riches humans had",
"Greed was like hope on steroids, ready to see the object of desire where it did not exist",
"One never had to hide from numbers, In math two plus two always equaled four, In English literature two plus two could equal two above ground, one in a tomb, and one swallowing poison, Philosophy, sociologythe studies of why people felt as they did and did as they didwere even worse",
"Of course she had heard the word 'fuck' before, She'd just never heard it used as a verb, a noun, and an adjective, often in a single sentence",
"The apple showed nearly as much courage as the tree",
"her skin had faded to the color of an old chamois cloth, hard used and much laundered",
"Sean started putting on his shoes with a slowness that would have done a recalcitrant fouryearold proud",
“People who held up the Bible and proclaimed their belief in God, then denied Lucifer and his demons were cherry picking, God didnt work like that, Charles had always known he couldnt take only the good parts of anything, Without darkness, light was meaningless, Without Satan, God was nothing but a schizophrenic with a cruel streak”,
“Anna found money an alien concept, In the real world a hot bath, an apple, a cup of tea: Those things were real”,
“Dog nose paid off before human eye”,
"damp and lichen drew faces on the stones",
"Reg was performing a remarkable feat he was whining in a baritone, and with bravado",
“In the bottom ran a shallow stream the music shed heard earlier”,
"Night did not so much fall as thicken imperceptibly around the trees and bushes",
“No crunching of a man trying to navigate the night woods followed”,
“God is good, Heath thought, Then, considering the situation, amended it to: God is not as rotten as he could have been”,
“She crossed and entered again into the midnight of trees”,
"To wear a jacket like that in a tiny airplane put Leah in mind of a lab tech she'd worked with who wore full motorcycle leathers when he rode hiscc scooter to work".

“Even though Heath couldnt feel it, there could be no harm in warming the blood headed back up to her friends heart”,
This series has really changed over the years, As the books go on the main character Anna Pigeon has become less of a mystery solving park ranger and more if a reckless vigilante, I am not sure why the last few books have taken Anna out of her profession and the settings are always now based on vacations or retreats, I don't recall Anna being so sociopathic in the earlier books I used to really empathize with her and like the character, Now each book gets stranger and stranger, In this one she completely goes rouge and become feral, losing her humanity in order to help save her friends, Parts of the story just seems really unrealistic a billionaire engineer out in the woods without a satellite phone, And the ending was bizarre I did not see that coming because the author did not make any references to the bad guys motives at all, I'd love for Anna to get back to her mystery solving Park Ranger of yesteryear, We will see. Recommended. I loved The Rope, the Anna Pigeon prequel, that was the last entry in this longrunning series, This new one is a clear cut above even that, Three women friends and two teenaged daughters in the wilderness, One of the women a paraplegic, And an old dog. Once camp is set up, Anna leaves for a solitary paddle in one of their two canoes, And then, in come the bad guys, Four of them, tough, seasoned, creepy, Depraved. Sink the canoe. Kill the dog. This one is not a whodunit, but rather a "What's going to happen next" It's exciting, suspenseful, with many twists and turns, But Nevada Barr is an old hand at this by now, and deftly shades the action and suspense with an excellent psychological study of the three friends and two daughters, giving the story a kind of richness not often achieved.
There will be plenty of opportunities for held breath, exclamations of shock or surprise or, . . no, that would be telling, . . but the level of suspense keeps ratcheting upwards, and ever upwards, After all heavily armed captors. Mature, unathletic women, one of whom can't stand on her own, on a forced march through dense forest, A spoiled young girl, selfcentered, younger than her years, A slightly older girl, rescued from horrific violence in her past, Anna nowhere in sight. What can they possibly do but march forward and trust, or hope, they will survive, What can they possibly do And how Anna Pigeon, a ranger for the U, S. Park Services, sets off on vacationan autumn canoe trip in the to the Iron Range in upstate Minnesota, With Anna is her friend Heath, a paraplegic Heaths fifteenyearold daughter, Elizabeth Leah, a wealthy designer of outdoor equipment and her daughter, Katie, who is thirteen, For Heath and Leah, this is a shakedown cruise to test a new cutting edge line of camping equipment, The equipment, designed by Leah, will make camping and canoeing more accessible to disabled outdoorsmen,

On their second night out, Anna goes off on her own for a solo evening float on the Fox River, When she comes back, she finds that four thugs, armed with rifles, pistols, and knives, have taken the two women and their teenaged daughters captive, With limited resources and no access to the outside world, Anna has only two days to rescue them before her friends are either killed or flown out of the country.
Ranger Anna Piegon is on vacation with a female friend and her stepdaughter, While Anna seeks some solitude one day, her companions are kidnapped by four men with sinister purposes, Anna has only two days to rescue her friends in a remote wilderness area, I did not feel that this book was up to the standards of Ms Barr's previous works of the series, In "Destroyer Angel," Nevada Barr channels Lee Child, Anna Pigeon finds her inner Jack Reacher, Not that Anna wasn't tough before, She's tough in a real way, not a cartoon like Reacher, There is no mystery here, just Anna in a bad spot from the getgo,

In this corner, Anna and her four female wilderness exploring friends, Two teenagers, one paraplegic, one “mad scientist, ” And an old dog.

In that corner, four thugs, One is “scum for hire,” even in the view of the leader, Another is a “lowend drug dealer” who owes the bookies bigtime, Another is “smalltime muscle. ” Shocking but true: they dont all get along,

The bad guys have some sort of plan but it isnt entirely clear, They are certainly after Anna amp Co, Mostly the Co. The plan evolves. Theres a landing strip they need to locate, a plane due soon for a pickup and woods in which to get lost,

When the story starts, Anna is off on the river by herself

so when she returns to camp and realizes her friends have been joined by some extremely grumpy company, guess who must save the day

I dont have a spreadsheet handy from theother Anna Pigeon novels and I havent read them all but I do believe Ms.
Pigeon inflicts more damage on the creeps here than in any other previous adventure, She also suffers more wounds and oozes more blood,

With Nevada Barrs tasty prose leading the way and Annas unique insights available to us at every bloody turn, Destroyer Angel cruises along, Amid the action, Barrs unique style and Annas strong voice ring through, “The air was a delicate balance, The last of summer rested on the skin as the prickle of coming winter brushed the mind, Anna could taste the fertile loamy scent of leaves, fall and readying to return to the earth, and the lingering smell of warm grass, dust, and pine, Mated with the spicy scent of campfire smoke, it triggered a longing for sometime, someplace, someone that never existed, but was nonetheless exquisite, and to be deliciously mourned, ”

The straight storyline rarely stops for a breath, but what pulls us along is Annas ongoing inner monologuea frothy mix of wry humor, thoughts on god and references to forgotten movies such as “Little Big Man” or the lumberjack bit from Monty Python.


At the outset of Destroyer Angel, Pigeon is able to save the lone old dog from the bad guys so Anna and the pup form a pair of wounded soldiers who work together.
There is a lot of talking to the dog and expressionless reactions from the canine,

Plausibility is dunked, briefly, in the cold waters of the river, The bad guys are appropriately dumb and appropriately chicken at the right times, Bears and wolves, oh my, Bullets fly, clouds descend, snippets of conversation are overheard at just the right time and poisonous mushrooms are pocketed for future use, That dog knows just when to be quiet,

And Anna slogs on, No “mystery” here. No red herrings or cluefinding maybe a bit at the beginning, Its Anna Pigeon versus nature and four oafs, Who says the women cant get tough as nails Who
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