How many Anna Pigeon books are there? Nevada Barr wrote them after years as a working park ranger — and isn't finished
The new Anna Pigeon series on USA has done what adaptations always do: sent a wave of people to the library to ask "wait, this is a book?" It is a book. It is, in fact, a lot of books, and their author used to carry a gun and a radio for the National Park Service, which explains why the bodies in them are always found somewhere with a trailhead.
The number
There are 19 Anna Pigeon novels, published between 1993 and 2016. The first, Track of the Cat, won both the Agatha and Anthony awards for best first mystery and let Nevada Barr quit her ranger job and write full time. The most recent, Boar Island, sent Anna to Acadia National Park in Maine to deal with cyberbullying and a body in the fog.
In between, Anna went basically everywhere you've ever wanted to camp:
- Isle Royale, twice (once in winter, which is worse)
- Mesa Verde, Carlsbad Caverns, Glacier, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain
- The Natchez Trace, Big Bend, Glen Canyon
- New York City, via the Statue of Liberty, because national parks technically include that
- New Orleans, post-Katrina, in a book called Burn that is exactly as cheerful as it sounds
There's also a prequel, The Rope (2012), that goes back to Anna's first season as a ranger, and it's the second novel the TV show has pulled from so far.
Each book is a different park and a different way to die. Nevada Barr's own explanation of how she picks settings: "First, are they a good place to die? Second, do I know anybody there I can use as a contact to weasel my way into the heart of things?"
The ranger part is not a gimmick
Barr was born in Yerington, Nevada (yes, that's where the name comes from), and raised by parents who were both pilots. She did theater in New York, hated it, and ended up working for the National Park Service for eight years, six seasonal and two permanent, in places like Guadalupe Mountains in Texas, Natchez Trace in Mississippi, and Isle Royale in Michigan. All three became books.
Anna, she's said repeatedly, started as her own alter ego. "Anna was conceived as my alter ego when I was working as a law enforcement ranger in Guadalupe Mountains National Park," she told BookBrowse. Track of the Cat "was not written as the first in a series, but as an expression of who I was then set amid murder and mayhem."
She also gave Anna a sister named Molly who's a psychiatrist. Barr's real sister is named Molly. "She is not a psychiatrist," Barr has said, "but she's my psychiatrist, and we talk on the phone constantly."
Not finished, in every sense
Barr is 73 now and lives in Ashland, Oregon. The 19th book came out a decade ago, and there's a 2019 standalone, What Rose Forgot, in between, but she has never declared Anna done, and the character is now actively generating new stories without her having to type them.
The TV rights were optioned for years. "This was the 23rd time the book was optioned," Barr said at the premiere in August. "Lea and Morwyn made it work," meaning executive producer Lea Thompson, who's held the rights since 2014, and showrunner Morwyn Brebner.
On watching the show invent cases she never wrote: "They have captured the essence and they will make new stories. It's like reknitting wonderful things out of old yarn. I can't wait to see what they do."
She's also admitted that she no longer pictures Anna as a "younger, more glamorous" version of herself. She pictures Tracy Spiridakos. Which, honestly, is the dream outcome of selling your book 23 times.
If you want to start
Publication order is the way. Track of the Cat, A Superior Death, Ill Wind, Firestorm. By the fourth one you'll know whether you're an Anna Pigeon person. Most people who make it to four are.
