Nevada Barr brings her acclaimed New York Times bestselling Anna Pigeon series to the Big Easy with one of her most compelling, complex novels yet!
Anna Pigeon, a Ranger with the National Park Service, is newly married but on istrative leave from her job as she recovers from the physical and emotional traumas of the past couple of months. With her new husband back at work, Anna decides to go and visit an old friend: Geneva, a blind blues singer who performs at New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park.
Anna isn't in town long before she discovers what seems to be an attempt to place a curse on her—a gruesomely killed pigeon marked with runic symbols—and begins to find traces of very dark doings in post-Katrina New Orleans. Tied up in all of this a tenant of Geneva's who is not at all what he appears to be; a fugitive mother accused of killing her husband and daughters; and faint whispers of unpleasant goings-on in the heart of the slowly recovering city.
Now it will take all of Anna's skills learned in the untamed outdoors to navigate the urban jungle in which she finds herself, to uncover the threads that connect these seemingly disparate people, and to rescue the most vulnerable of creatures from the most savage of animals.