Feisty, resourceful forest ranger Anna Pigeon faced everything from raging fires to deep-water dives with cool aplomb in her first five adventures. Very early in Blind Descent her courage is put to an even greater test when she learns that a woman seriously injured while exploring a cave next door to New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns is a friend who has requested Pigeon's help in getting her out. "A chilling image filled Anna's mind: herself crouched and whimpering, fear pouring like poison through her limbs, shutting down her brain as the cave closed in around her." Pushing aside her fears, Pigeon takes the plunge, leading readers through a truly harrowing series of tight squeezes. Nevada Barr is so good at involving us in Anna's terror that when she finally resurfaces, we share her "unadulterated joy. Even the dirt smelled alive... When she saw her first stars, she croaked out her delight from tired lungs." Above ground, Anna quickly gets involved in two possibly linked murders and becomes a rifleman's target. As we share the progress of her investigation, a sneaky suspicion starts to grow of possible suspects within the small community of spelunkers and National Park Service bureaucrats. Barr couldn't possibly ask Anna to go back underground again, could she? When it happens, of course, it seems inevitable--and just as frightening as the first time.


From Publishers Weekly
Early in this sixth tale in Barr's evocative and suspenseful series (after 1997's Endangered Species), national park ranger Anna Pigeon is summoned from duty in Colorado to New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns. A woman caver seriously injured while exploring the nearby Lechuguilla cave is a friend who has asked specifically that Anna help in her rescue. Anna has faced everything from forest fires to deep-water dives with equanimity, but claustrophobia has so far kept her above-ground. "A chilling image filled Anna's mind: herself crouched and whimpering, fear pouring like poison through her limbs, shutting down her brain as the cave closed in around her." Fully aware of her vulnerability, Anna nevertheless takes the plunge, leading readers through a truly harrowing series of tight squeezes. Barr is so good at involving us in Anna's terror that, when Anna finally reaches the surface again, we share her "unadulterated joy. Even the dirt smelled alive." Above ground, Anna quickly becomes involved in pursuing possible links between two murders and soon finds herself a rifleman's target. A sneaky suspicion starts to grow as we share the progress of her investigation of possible suspects within the sharply sketched community of cavers and National Park Service bureaucrats. Barr couldn't possibly ask Anna?and us?to go back underground again, could she? Wouldn't that be more than courage and credulity could bear? When it happens, of course, it seems inevitable and thoroughly satisfying?thanks to the writing and plotting talents of a master. Mystery Guild main selection; author tour. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA-When Anna Pigeon learns that fellow park ranger Frieda Dierkz lies injured within the depths of Lechugilla Cavern, she overcomes her claustrophobia and wills herself into the cave, along with the official rescue team. Working against her anxiety, Anna concentrates on the difficulties of moving the woman through passages and over formations while another fear begins to surface. Frieda is sure that an attempt was made on her life and rigged to look like an accident. Her apprehensions prove correct when she is killed by a fall that almost takes Anna's life as well. Left with just a shred of information, Anna sets out to find the killer. Barr brings the intricate, fascinating, and deadly underground world of spelunking into close and intimate focus using Anna's divergent emotions of awe and near terror as she works her way through the total blackness. Readers are immersed in the setting, and Anna's claustrophobia, tangibly intense at times, keeps the tension of the plot tautly controlled. She pushes herself to the limit, determined to solve the mysteries of death and dirty dealings that appear to center on the importance and fate of Lechugilla Cavern. While about half of the story takes place above ground, the intense moments occur in the deep orifices below. Barr has created a variety of characters in the rescue team, each distinct in personality and style. All of the twists and turns of the cave and the plot finally come together in an action-packed ending.Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
An underground classic? Barr's popular park ranger, Anna Pigeon, investigates murder in New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review
"Barr's description of this Stygian underworld--so beautiful, so mysterious and so treacherous--have a stunning visceral quality, largely because of her heroine's affinity with the natural world. Strong, independent and proud of it, Anna is less appreciative of nature's higher orders. ('If she had a tail,' she says of her edgy encounter with another caver, 'it would have been lashing.') Her abrasiveness may bind Anna to the subtler signals of human behavior, but alone in the darkness, she can see clear to the heart of the matter."


From Booklist
National park ranger Anna Pigeon dislikes caves as much as Indiana Jones dislikes snakes. But she goes underground when her friend Frieda Dierkz is injured while surveying the newly discovered Lechugilla Cave, near Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. After traveling 16 dangerous, exhausting hours through the cave, Anna learns that someone dropped a rock on Frieda. Faced with numerous suspects and park managers who want to whitewash the incident, Anna pursues Frieda's assailant, who murders another survey member. This seventh Anna Pigeon novel effectively combines Barr's typically compelling characters with the unique cave setting. Her Lechugilla Cave is an ominous and unsettling place, similar in its effect on the reader to the underground in Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. The pace slows some near the end, but Barr's gripping prose never loses its hold: we feel Anna's fear acutely, and the tension of the rescue is palpable. Barr fans will also enjoy other outdoor sleuths such as Beverly Connor's Lindsay Chamberlain and Skye Kathleen Moody's Venus Diamond. John Rowen


From Kirkus Reviews
When Mesa Verde National Park dispatcher Frieda Dierkz, on an avocational expedition to explore and survey the Lechuguilla cave in New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns, is trapped 800 feet beneath the earth's surface by a head injury and a shattered leg, the person she asks authorities above to send after her is her friend Anna Pigeon. Following a week's worth of deep breaths, Anna, together with Carlsbad cave specialist Oscar Iverson and Underground Resource Coordinator Holden Tillman, undertakes a nine-hour journey she compares to ``an expedition into outer space'' toward Frieda and the five other members of her crew-- only to hear from Frieda that her accident was no accident at all. Before the rescuers can return with Frieda to the surface, another disastrous ``accident'' heightens the mystery. Then the grueling tour de force of the novel's subterranean first half is matched by violence aboveground as well, and by unwelcome revelations suggesting that several of Frieda's companions--a former lover, his jealous wife, a veteran caver whose sister was killed on Frieda's watch--may have had good reason to kill her. With all the irresistible force of nightmare, Anna's pulled back on a return visit to Lechuguilla, where she'll find much more than she bargained for. Barr's superbly unerring eye for natural setting and human conflict has made Anna's five earlier adventures (Endangered Species, 1997, etc.) as distinctively memorable as the National Parks themselves. This installment is the most suspenseful of all, even though claustrophobes are well-advised to stock up on Prozac before turning the first page. (Mystery Guild main selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
A would-be killer is drawing Anna Pigeon deep into the darkness-and closer to hell than she's ever gone before."Anna Pigeon, the intrepid National Park Service ranger in Nevada Barr's superb wilderness mysteries, has had some perilous experiences in the five novels that preceded Blind Descent, but none compares with this thrilling subterranean adventure in the underground caverns of Lechuguilla, 'a monster man-eating cave' in New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns. When a fellow ranger is injured in a caving accident, Anna chokes back the willies of claustrophobia and joins the rescue team. Burrowing 800 feet below ground, she negotiates airless tunnells, gaping pits, vaulting caverns and silently flowing rivers, each hazard with a daunting name like Razor Blade Run or the Wormhole. At the end of the dangerous descent, she reaches her friend and hears her say, 'It wasn't an accident.' A would-be killer is drawing Anna Pigeon deep into the darkness-and closer to hell than she's ever gone before. 


About the Author
Award-winning novelist Nevada Barr is the author of six previous Anna Pigeon mysteries including Firestorm, Ill Wind, A Superior Death, and Track of the Cat. She has worked as a park ranger at Isle Royale National Park, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Mesa Verde National Park, and Natchez Trace Parkway, and lives in Mississippi.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Lechuguilla Cavern is a man-eating cave discovered in New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns National Park in the mid-1980s. Estimated to extend for more than three hundred miles, only ninety of them mapped, the cave was formed by acid burning away the limestone; corridors, pits, cramped wormholes, cliffs, and splendid rooms the size of football fields tangle together in a maze shrouded in the utter darkness of the underground. When a fellow ranger is injured in a caving accident, Anna swallows her paralyzing fear of small spaces and descends into Lechuguilla to help a friend in need. Worse than the claustrophobia that haunts her are the signs - some natural and some, more ominously, manmade - that not everyone is destined to emerge from this wondrous living tomb. The terrain is alien and hostile; the greed and destructive powers of mankind all too familiar. In this place of internal terrors, Anna must learn who it is she can trust and, in the end, decide who is to live and who is to die.

SYNOPSIS

A would-be killer is drawing Anna Pigeon deep into the darkness-and closer to hell than she's ever gone before.

"Anna Pigeon, the intrepid National Park Service ranger in Nevada Barr's superb wilderness mysteries, has had some perilous experiences in the five novels that preceded Blind Descent, but none compares with this thrilling subterranean adventure in the underground caverns of Lechuguilla, 'a monster man-eating cave' in New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns. When a fellow ranger is injured in a caving accident, Anna chokes back the willies of claustrophobia and joins the rescue team. Burrowing 800 feet below ground, she negotiates airless tunnells, gaping pits, vaulting caverns and silently flowing rivers, each hazard with a daunting name like Razor Blade Run or the Wormhole. At the end of the dangerous descent, she reaches her friend and hears her say, 'It wasn't an accident.'

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Early in this sixth tale in Barr's evocative and suspenseful series (after 1997's Endangered Species), national park ranger Anna Pigeon is summoned from duty in Colorado to New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns. A woman caver seriously injured while exploring the nearby Lechuguilla cave is a friend who has asked specifically that Anna help in her rescue. Anna has faced everything from forest fires to deep-water dives with equanimity, but claustrophobia has so far kept her above-ground. "A chilling image filled Anna's mind: herself crouched and whimpering, fear pouring like poison through her limbs, shutting down her brain as the cave closed in around her." Fully aware of her vulnerability, Anna nevertheless takes the plunge, leading readers through a truly harrowing series of tight squeezes. Barr is so good at involving us in Anna's terror that, when Anna finally reaches the surface again, we share her "unadulterated joy. Even the dirt smelled alive." Above ground, Anna quickly becomes involved in pursuing possible links between two murders and soon finds herself a rifleman's target. A sneaky suspicion starts to grow as we share the progress of her investigation of possible suspects within the sharply sketched community of cavers and National Park Service bureaucrats. Barr couldn't possibly ask Annaand usto go back underground again, could she? Wouldn't that be more than courage and credulity could bear? When it happens, of course, it seems inevitable and thoroughly satisfyingthanks to the writing and plotting talents of a master. Mystery Guild main selection; author tour. (Mar.)

School Library Journal

YA-When Anna Pigeon learns that fellow park ranger Frieda Dierkz lies injured within the depths of Lechugilla Cavern, she overcomes her claustrophobia and wills herself into the cave, along with the official rescue team. Working against her anxiety, Anna concentrates on the difficulties of moving the woman through passages and over formations while another fear begins to surface. Frieda is sure that an attempt was made on her life and rigged to look like an accident. Her apprehensions prove correct when she is killed by a fall that almost takes Anna's life as well. Left with just a shred of information, Anna sets out to find the killer. Barr brings the intricate, fascinating, and deadly underground world of spelunking into close and intimate focus using Anna's divergent emotions of awe and near terror as she works her way through the total blackness. Readers are immersed in the setting, and Anna's claustrophobia, tangibly intense at times, keeps the tension of the plot tautly controlled. She pushes herself to the limit, determined to solve the mysteries of death and dirty dealings that appear to center on the importance and fate of Lechugilla Cavern. While about half of the story takes place above ground, the intense moments occur in the deep orifices below. Barr has created a variety of characters in the rescue team, each distinct in personality and style. All of the twists and turns of the cave and the plot finally come together in an action-packed ending.-Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

AudioFile - Joyce E. McCarty

Caves. Claustrophobia. Politics. Murder. Wrap them all around a diverse cast of characters, and another adventure of park ranger Anna Pigeon comes vividly to life. As Pigeon sets out on a subterranean rescue mission, determined to save her longtime friend despite her own fears of closed spaces, veteran reader Barbara Rosenblat pulls the listener into this tale of human complexities and courage. She capitalizes upon the underlying sardonic humor that balances the suspense and intensity of the plot. Rosenblat even belts out a few phrases of song in her rich contralto, leaving the listener wishing for more. J.E.M. ￯﾿ﾽAudioFile, Portland, Maine

NY Times Book Review

On a hair-raising mission into a "monster man-eating cave" in Carlsbad Caverns, a National Park Service ranger discovers that a member of ther rescue team is a killer.

Kirkus Reviews

When Mesa Verde National Park dispatcher Frieda Dierkz, on an avocational expedition to explore and survey the Lechuguilla cave in New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns, is trapped 800 feet beneath the earth's surface by a head injury and a shattered leg, the person she asks authorities above to send after her is her friend Anna Pigeon. Following a week's worth of deep breaths, Anna, together with Carlsbad cave specialist Oscar Iverson and Underground Resource Coordinator Holden Tillman, undertakes a nine-hour journey she compares to "an expedition into outer space" toward Frieda and the five other members of her crew—only to hear from Frieda that her accident was no accident at all. Before the rescuers can return with Frieda to the surface, another disastrous "accident" heightens the mystery. Then the grueling tour de force of the novel's subterranean first half is matched by violence aboveground as well, and by unwelcome revelations suggesting that several of Frieda's companions—a former lover, his jealous wife, a veteran caver whose sister was killed on Frieda's watch—may have had good reason to kill her. With all the irresistible force of nightmare, Anna's pulled back on a return visit to Lechuguilla, where she'll find much more than she bargained for. Barr's superbly unerring eye for natural setting and human conflict has made Anna's five earlier adventures (Endangered Species, 1997, etc.) as distinctively memorable as the National Parks themselves. This installment is the most suspenseful of all, even though claustrophobes are well-advised to stock up on Prozac before turning the first page. (Mystery Guild main selection; author tour)