"Burn" by Nevada Barr - Mental Compost

It is with heavy heart that I am finally laying down the Anna Pigeon novel,

before reaching “the end.”

Number 16 in the series about a middle-aged female law enforcement park ranger (Anna Pigeon) employed by the National Park Service, “Burn” has finally jumped off the cliff toward which author Barr has been perilously moving through the previous 3 novels in the series.

. Anna – who is essentially “Jessica Fletcher meets Colombo in a green and gray uniform and gray-streaked hair – moves around the country to serve in different National Park settings, meanwhile solving various murder mysteries along the way. The first 12 novels were your basic “who-done-its” – well-written stories that were highly entertaining.

“Hard Truth”

(#13), however, started to venture off the beaten path into the land of mental illness. Still well-written, the story began to veer toward the “creepy” side. Though it hinted at a supernatural connection, the conjecture turned out to be false, and Barr was able to step back from the edge of the cliff toward which she had been climbing. Number 14,

“Winter Study”

– though not supernatural in the least – jumped fully into downright gross and disgusting on several fronts that certainly hammered home the underlying theme of mental instability, but which weren’t entertaining in the slightest. I was truly left wondering what had occurred in the author’s personal life that triggered such a drastic departure from her usual style. Number 15 in the series,

“Borderline,”

found Anna back on more stable, if not totally familiar ground, but now “Burn” has brought a full-on schizophrenia to Barr’s story-telling ability with the characters – including Pigeon – becoming bogged down in tremendously adjective-laden monologs that take place solely in their mentally-challenged and spiritually-disturbed souls. The thought processes are so circular, it reminds me of the water circling the drain in the tub, right before it begins its journey into the septic system. I guess it was too much to ask for Barr to keep up the momentum of solid story-telling and page-turning entertainment forever. Unfortunately, it might have been better had she just killed Pigeon off in the “Borderline” and called it a day.