Nevada Barr books in order

In her very first novel, award-winning author Nevada Barr reveals another side to her remarkable storytelling prowess with this heart-wrenching yet tender tale of two women whose boundless devotion to each other is continually challenged in nineteenth century America.

Thirteen of today's hottest female crime novelists--one thrilling mystery: Naked Came the Phoenix.

The promise of discretion and pampering-and a long-overdue reconciliation with her mother-draws Caroline Blessing, the young wife of a newly-elected Congressman, to the fancy Phoenix Spa. But after her first night in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, Caroline wakes to find the rich and famous guests in turmoil and under suspicion: the spa's flamboyant and ambitious owner has been murdered. As the secrets come out-and the body count rises, can Caroline keep herself from becoming the next victim?

With contributions from:

Nevada Barr ~ J.D. Robb ~ Nancy Pickard ~ Lisa Scottoline ~ Perri O'Shaughnessy ~ J.A. Jance ~ Faye Kellerman ~ Mary Jane Clark ~ Marcia Talley ~ Anne Perry ~ Diana Gabaldon ~ Val McDermid ~ Laure R. King

In 1971, the state of Minnesota was rocked by the "Butcher Boy" incident, as coverage of a family brutally murdered by one of their own swept across newspapers and television screens nationwide.

Now, in present-day New Orleans, Polly Deschamps finds herself at yet another lonely crossroads in her life. No stranger to tragedy, Polly was a runaway at the age of fifteen, escaping a nightmarish Mississippi childhood.

Lonely, that is, until she encounters architect Marshall Marchand. Polly is immediately smitten. She finds him attractive, charming, and intelligent. Marshall, a lifelong bachelor, spends most of his time with his brother Danny. When Polly’s two young daughters from her previous marriage are likewise taken with Marshall, she marries him.

However, as Polly begins to settle into her new life, she becomes uneasy about her husband’s increasing dark moods, fearing that Danny may be influencing Marshall in ways she cannot understand.

But what of the ominous prediction by a New Orleans tarot card reader, who proclaims that Polly will murder her husband? What, if any, is the Marchands' connection to the infamous "Butcher Boy" multiple homicide? And could Marshall and his eccentric brother be keeping a dark secret from Polly, one that will shatter the happiness she has forever prayed for?

What She Forgot Is Frightening.

Rose Dennis wakes up in a hospital gown, her brain in a fog. With no memory of how she ended up at this unknown medical facility, Rose is sure that something is very wrong.

When she overhears one of the administrators saying about her that she's "not making it through the week," Rose is convinced that if she's to survive, she has to stop taking her medication. Becoming more and more lucid, she devises a plan of escape.

What She Remembers Is Deadly.

The only problem for Rose now is: how does she convince anyone that what she’s experienced is true? With her memory shaky, how can she even trust herself? Enlisting the help of her computer-hacker sister and her teenage granddaughter, Rose begins to piece together fragments of her life.

But any lingering doubt that she’s in real danger is erased when a stranger starts showing up at her now-abandoned house, determined to get rid of Rose once and for all.

Anna Pigeon has fled New York and her memories to find work as a ranger in the country’s national parks. In the remote backcountry of West Texas, however, she discovers murder and violence.

Fellow park ranger Sheila Drury is mysteriously killed, presumably by a mountain lion. But the deep claw marks Anna finds across Drury’s throat and the paw prints surrounding the body are too perfect to be real.

Anna Pigeon, in her career as a National Park Service Ranger, has had to deal with all manner of crimes and misdemeanors, but cyber-bullying and stalking is a new one. 

he target is Elizabeth, the adopted teenage daughter of her friend Heath Jarrod. Elizabeth is driven to despair by the disgusting rumors spreading online and bullying texts. Until, one day, Heath finds her daughter Elizabeth in the midst of an unsuccessful suicide attempt. And then she calls in the cavalry---her aunt Gwen and her friend Anna Pigeon.

While they try to deal with the fragile state of affairs---and find the person behind the harassment---the three adults decide the best thing to do is to remove Elizabeth from the situation. Since Anna is about to start her new post as Acting Chief Ranger at Acadia National Park in Maine, the three will join her and stay at a house on the cliff of a small island near the park, Boar Island.

But the move east doesn't solve the problem. The stalker has followed them east. And Heath (a paraplegic) and Elizabeth aren't alone on the otherwise deserted island. At the same time, Anna has barely arrived at Acadia before a brutal murder is committed by a killer uncomfortably close to her.

Park ranger Anna Pigeon returns, in a mystery that unfolds in and around Lake Superior, in whose chilling depths sunken treasure comes with a deadly price.

In her latest mystery, Nevada Barr sends Ranger Pigeon to a new post amid the cold, deserted, and isolated beauty of Isle Royale National Park, a remote island off the coast of Michigan known for fantastic deep-water dives of wrecked sailing vessels.

Leaving behind memories of the Texas high desert and the environmental scam she helped uncover, Anna is adjusting to the cool damp of Lake Superior and the spirits and lore of the northern Midwest.

But when a routine application for a diving permit reveals a grisly underwater murder, Anna finds herself 260 feet below the forbidding surface of the lake, searching for the connection between a drowned man and an age-old cargo ship. 

Written with a naturalist's feel for the wilderness and a keen understanding of characters who thrive in extreme conditions, A Superior Death is a passionate, atmospheric page-turner.

Lately, visitors to Mesa Verde have been bringing home more than photos--they're also carrying a strange, deadly disease. And once it strikes, park ranger Anna Pigeon must find the very human source of the evil wind.

Separated from friends and family and haunted by personal demons, park ranger Anna Pigeon finds solace in the quiet ruins of the Anasazi civilization of Colorado's Mesa Verde. But the rugged beauty of the park and the mystery of the Anasazi are cruelly overshadowed by danger and death.

Lately, visitors to Mesa Verde have been bringing home more than photos...they're also carrying a strange — and deadly — disease. In order to prevent more deaths, Anna Pigeon must find the very human source of an evil wind.

NB: This book is also known as Mountain of Bones.

An insatiable, unstoppable beast, the wildfire called Jackknife has already devoured 17,000 acres of California's Lassen Volcanic National Park.

A devastating force of nature, it has brought out the very best -- and worst -- in those sworn to defeat it." Ranger Anna Pigeon is among the exhausted firefighters, serving as medic and spike camp security, when an abrupt weather shift sends Jackknife racing relentlessly in their direction.

And when the monstrous blaze has passed, Anna emerges from her protective shelter to discover two men are dead: one a victim of the hungry flames, the other stabbed through the heart.

Now, trapped in a nightmarish landscape of snow and ash, cut off from rescue by a rampaging winter storm, Anna must investigate an inexplicable homicide -- as she and nine others struggle to survive the terrible rage if nature...and the murderer in their midst

In the midst of a dangerously dry season, national park ranger Anna Pigeon has been posted to Cumberland Island off the Georgia coast for a monotonous, twenty-one day fire watch. But her boredom is short-lived, for this remote and marshy place is breeding ground for more than just the imperiled Loggerhead turtle; it also spawns eccentricity and secrets, greed, suspicion...and murder.

A small plane crashes into the palmetto thickets nearby. Anna and her crew arrive in time to control the blaze, but too late to save pilot and his passenger, Cumberland's sole law enforcement ranger.

When the cause of the "accident" is determined to be sabotage, Anna becomes entangled in an investigation that threatens to upset the very delicate balance of this fragile ecological preserve. For she is precariously close to exposing dark, clandestine crimes both old and new that someone has worked very diligently to conceal...and which make Anna Pigeon the most endangered creature on the island.

Park ranger Anna Pigeon is enjoying the open spaces of Colorado when she receives an urgent call. A young woman has been injured while exploring a cave in New Mexico's Carlsbad Cavern Park. Before she can be pulled to safety, she sends for her friend Anna. Only one problem: a crushing fear of confined spaces has kept Anna out in the open her whole life.

When Anna Pigeon left New York City after her husband was killed, she hoped it would be forever. But now her sister Molly is clinging to life in an uptown hospital ICU, so Anna has reluctantly returned. 

Rooming with a friend and fellow park ranger in close quarters on Liberty Island - the small strip of land that is home to Lady Liberty - Anna spends her free time exploring the grand monument and the crumbling, overgrown, and eerie ruins in the unrestored sections of nearby Ellis Island.

But the peace she seeks here is shattered when she finds herself among a crowd gathered at the Lady's base, staring at the broken body of a teenager who fell - or was pushed - to her death.

The reason behind the young girl's fatal plunge is not the only mystery alive on these historic sites - nor will hers be the only death. Hidden in a dangerous labyrinth of stone, glass, and steel are secrets Anna Pigeon is now compelled to uncover... and an insidious threat to herself and to others that could wreak havoc on a nation's proudest day.

Anna Pigeon finally gives in to her bureaucratic clock-and signs on for a promotion. Next thing she knows, she's knee-deep in mud and Mississippi. Not exactly what she had in mind.

Almost immediately, as the new district ranger on the Natchez Trace, Anna discovers the body of a young prom queen near a country cemetery, a sheet around her head, a noose around her neck. It's a bizarre twist on a best-forgotten past of frightening racial undertones.

As fast as the ever-encroaching kudzu vines of the region, the roots of this story run deep-and threaten to suffocate anyone in the way, including Anna...

Straddling the border between Montana and Canada lies the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park—Anna’s home away from home when she is sent on a cross-training assignment to study grizzly bears.

Along with bear researcher Joan Rand and a volatile, unpredictable teenage boy, Anna hikes the back country, seeking signs of bear. But the tables are turned on their second night out, when one of the beasts comes looking for them. Daybreak finds the boy missing, a camper mutilated, and Anna caught in a grip of fear, painfully aware that her lifelong bond with nature has inexplicably snapped...

The quiet beauty of autumn on Mississippi’s Natchez Trace is swiftly shattered when Anna answers a call to Mt. Locust, once a working plantation and inn, now a tourist spot. But the man Anna finds in an old bedroom is no tourist in distress.

He’s nearly naked, and very dead—his body bearing marks consistent with sex games gone awry. On a writing table nearby is an open Bible with ominous passages circled in red.

There are secrets that prominent men in this God-fearing country wish to keep under wraps—and Anna has stumbled into a nest of them.

Running from a proposal of marriage from Sheriff Paul Davidson, Anna Pigeon takes a post as a temporary supervisory ranger on remote Garden Key in Dry Tortugas National Park, a small grouping of tiny islands in a natural harbor seventy miles off Key West. This island paradise has secrets it would keep; not just in the present, but in shadows from its gritty past, when it served as a prison for the Lincoln conspirators during and after the Civil War.

Here, on this last lick of the United States, in a giant crumbling fortress, Anna has little company except for the occasional sunburned tourist or unruly shrimper. When her sister, Molly, sends her a packet of letters from a great-great-aunt who lived at the fort with her husband, a career soldier, Anna's fantasy life is filled with visions of this long-ago time.

When a mysterious boat explosion-and the discovery of unidentifiable body parts-keeps her anchored to the present, Anna finds crimes of past and present closing in on her. A tangled web that was woven before she arrived begins to threaten her sanity and her life.

Cut off from the mainland by miles of water, poor phone service, and sketchy radio contact, and aided by one law-enforcement ranger, Anna must find answers or weather a storm to rival the hurricanes for which the islands are famous.

It's fall in the Sierra Mountains, and Anna Pigeon is slinging hash in Yosemite National Park's historic Ahwahnee Hotel. Four young people, all seasonal park employees, have disappeared, and two weeks of work by crack search-and-rescue teams have failed to turn up a single clue; investigators are unsure as to whether the four went AWOL for reasons of their own - or died in the park. 

Needing an out-of-park ranger to work undercover, Anna is detailed to dining room duty; but after a week of waiting tables, she knows the missing employees are only the first indication of a sickness threatening the park. Her twenty-something roommates give up their party-girl ways and panic; her new restaurant colleagues regard her with suspicion and fear.

Yet when Anna's life if threatened and her temporary supervisor turns a deaf ear, she follows the scent of evil, taking a solo hike up a snowy trial to the high country, seeking answers. What awaits her is a nightmare of death and greed - and perhaps her final adventure.

Just three days after her wedding to Sheriff Paul Davidson, Anna Pigeon moves from Mississippi to Colorado to assume her new post as district ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park, where three young girls have disappeared during a religious retreat. Two of the children emerge a month later, clad only in filthy underwear and claiming to remember nothing of the intervening weeks. The girls are traumatized but forge a bond with the pair of campers who discovered them - a wheelchair-bound paraplegic and her elderly aunt.

With the reappearance of the children comes an odd and unsettling presence in the park, a sense of disembodied evil and unspeakable terror: small animals are mercilessly slaughtered and a sinister force seems to still control the girls. As Anna investigates, she finds herself caught up in the machinations of a paranoid religious sect determined to keep their secrets and the girls sequestered from law enforcement and psychiatric help.

Following the trails of the many suspects, especially that of the cult's intense youth group leader, Anna discovers the force which has destroyed the children's minds. Here in the park, evil has the eyes of a visionary and the soul of the devil. Anna will discover the truth-even if it kills her.

Soon after Anna Pigeon joins the famed wolf study team of Isle Royale National Park in the middle of Lake Superior, the wolf packs begin to behave in peculiar ways. Giant wolf prints are found, and Anna spies the form of a great wolf from a surveillance plane.

When a female member of the team is savaged, Anna is convinced they are being stalked, and what was once a beautiful, idyllic refuge becomes a place of unnatural occurrences and danger beyond the ordinary…

The killings on Isle Royale have left Anna drained and haunted, her memories of her time with the wolf study group forever marred by the carnage on the island. Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, she is on administrative leave, per her superintendent's urging. Anna wonders if the leave might not be permanent, either by her own choice or that of the National Park Service.

The one bright spot in Anna's life is Paul, her husband of less than a year. Hoping the warmth and the adventure of a raft trip in Big Bend National Park will lift her spirits, Paul takes Anna to southwest Texas, where the sun is hot and the Rio Grande is running high. The sheer beauty of the Chihuahuan Desert and the power of the river work their magic - until the raft is lost in the rapids and a young college student falls overboard, resulting in an even more grisly discovery. Caught in a strainer between two boulders and more dead than alive, is a pregnant woman, hair and arms tangled in the downed branches.

Instead of the soul-soothing experience they'd longed for, Anna and Paul find themselves sucked into a labyrinth of intrigue that leads from the Mexican desert to the steps of the Governor's Mansion in Austin, Texas.

Anna Pigeon, a Ranger with the National Park Service, is newly married but on administrative 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.

In 1995—35 years old, fresh off the bus from New York City, and nursing a broken heart—Anna Pigeon takes a decidedly unglamorous job as a seasonal employee of the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. On her day off, Anna goes hiking into the park never to return. Her co-workers think she's simply moved on; her cabin is cleaned out and her things are gone. But Anna herself wakes up, trapped at the bottom of a dry natural well, naked, without supplies and no clear memory of how she found herself in this situation.

As she slowly pieces together her memory, it soon becomes clear that someone has trapped her there, in an inescapable prison, and no one knows that she is even missing. Plunged into a landscape and a plot she is unfit and untrained to handle, Anna Pigeon must muster the courage, determination and will to live that she didn't even know she still possessed to survive, outwit and triumph.

For those legions of readers who have been entranced over the years by Park Ranger Anna Pigeon's strength and determination, and for those who are new to Nevada Barr's captivating, compelling series, The Rope is where it all starts.

Anna Pigeon, a ranger for the U.S. Park Services, sets off on vacation—an autumn canoe trip in the to the Iron Range in upstate Minnesota. With Anna is her friend Heath, a paraplegic; Heath's fifteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth; Leah, a wealthy designer of outdoor equipment; and her daughter, Katie, who is thirteen. For Heath and Leah, this is a shakedown cruise to test a new cutting edge line of camping equipment. The equipment, designed by Leah, will make camping and canoeing more accessible to disabled outdoorsmen.

On their second night out, Anna goes off on her own for a solo evening float on the Fox River. When she comes back, she finds that four thugs, armed with rifles, pistols, and knives, have taken the two women and their teenaged daughters captive. With limited resources and no access to the outside world, Anna has only two days to rescue them before her friends are either killed or flown out of the country,

A tenth anthology celebrating the cozy mystery genre presents the work of some of today's finest mystery writers, including Agatha Award winners and nominees, such as Simon Brett, Carolyn Hart, Peter Lovesey, Anne Perry, Nancy Pickard, Margaret Maron, M. D. Lake, Susan Dunlap, K. K. Beck, and others. Original.

Here is a complete collection of the anthology series, written by various authors:

1. Malice Domestic 1 (1992)

2. Malice Domestic 2 (1993)

3. Malice Domestic 3 (1994)

4. Malice Domestic 4 (1995)

5. Malice Domestic 5 (1996)

6. Malice Domestic 6 (1997)

7. Malice Domestic 7 (1998)

8. Malice Domestic 8 (1999)

9. Malice Domestic 9 (2000)

10. Malice Domestic 10 (2001)

11. Katherine Hall Page Presents Malice Domestic 11 (2016)

12. Charlaine Harris Presents Malice Domestic 12 (2017)

13. Nancy Pickard Presents Malice Domestic 13 (2018)

14. Murder Most Edible (2019)

15. Ellen Hart Presents Malice Domestic 15 (2020)

More Malice Domestic: A Novella (1997)

Actor, adventuress, seeker of truth, and author of the New York Times bestselling Anna Pigeon mystery series, Nevada Barr beckons readers to share her spiritual search for meaning in life.

Hat by hat, step by step, Barr leads readers down her path to enlightenment by sharing personal episodes, some of them funny and revealing, others painfully honest.

Each chapter offers a truth or an answer forged through experience and deep reflection, and a nugget of insight certain to encourage thought and discussion among readers, who may, in turn, find their own spiritual language.

Smoke and Murders is a new short story by New York Times Best Selling Author, Nevada Barr. The story is a romp through New Orleans, Nevada's home town.

A woman witnesses a murder at the hands of a serial killer and decides the city's high crime rate should be considered a resource rather than a curse.

Revenge, humor, character and plot twists, the things Nevada is famous for, make this sixteen pages as steal at six cents a page. Enjoy.