The rope (An Anne Pigeon Novel)

 by Nevada Barr.  Sooner or later, every hero gets an origin story. Anna Pigeon, the park ranger who's starred in a series of popular novels, gets hers now. It's 1995. Anna, a new hire at the Dangling Rope Park, has disappeared. Her coworkers (most of whom consider her to be a little odd anyway) figure she's just wandered off somewhere, maybe gone back to New York. But, as we learn in terrifying detail, she's been taken by an unknown assailant and tossed naked into the bottom of a hole. The hole, as it turns out, has had previous occupants, one of whom, relatively recently deceased, Anna digs up this is sure to turn some stomachs and then takes her clothes. Eventually, she escapes from captivity by bashing her captor on the head; but, returning to the hole with law-enforcement officers, Anna discovers she's bashed not her captor but one of her colleagues, who had been trying to rescue her, or so he says. Dark and visceral, the novel is sure to appeal to Barr's legion of fans, especially those who have been clamoring for the author to light the shadows of Anna's past. Here we see a familiar character in a sort of rough-draft form, the way Lee Child's novels about Jack Reacher's early days show us a still-forming, rough-around-the-edges version of the familiar hero. A crisply written and revelatory entry in the Pigeon series. --Booklist (Check Catalog)