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Four young employees have turned up missing from their dwellings, and the park service has no clues. Anna is brought in chat up the other employees to find out what might have happened to them. Her entry isn't as smooth as it could have been. The chef and the head of the wait staff don't seem too enthralled with Anna getting such a plum job when she obviously isn't a very good waitress. She's bunking with some very young women who are young enough to be her daughters, which limits her interaction possibilities with them. But soon, bizarre people and events start to build up, and clearly the chase is on. The action builds to an exciting climax as Anna unravels the central element of the mystery. This section of the book is a definite five-star effort. But the book slows down from there and moseys on to a predictable ending.
The book has little character development in it to help you enjoy the story more. So the action elements are what drive the story's appeal. And there just aren't enough of those elements.
Parts of the plot are very implausible and almost reminded me of a satire of every gruesome Halloween movie you've ever seen. So take all of those as a sort of campy humor if you want to enjoy the book more.
Fans of Anna Pigeon novels should definitely read the book, but don't expect to find this one to be one of your favorites in this excellent series.
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This is set in Yosemite, but revolves around the disappearance of 4 young people. Basically it all revolves around drugs, a seedier side of life in "Paradise". Whilst it is quite a good little story there are too many aspects which are unbelievable - like the fact that a plane crashes and nobody notices.
I suppose in the end the characters aren't that well drawn, just vague stereotypes and although its nice not to have a perfect super ranger in Anna Pigeon, some of the things she does (like confronting criminals all the time) are pretty silly.
Which is what this book is all about. The set-up is simple enough: Anna Pigeon, upwardly mobile park ranger, is working undercover in a swank hotel as a waitress, hoping to suss out the fate of four hikers who went missing and are presumably dead. But what this book is really about is evil: the human evil that, like endless November fog, can invade even sacred places like Yosemite; and the spiritual evil to which some people have surrendered more than others, but which is beneath the skin of us all. Opposing this, Barr sets a collection of women of varying degrees of spiritual and emotional innocence (and in some cases, intellectual innocence) and throughout, she uses undercover detective work as a metaphor for the loss and retaining of one's identity in the face of pressures that would make you someone you don't want to be.
Basically, this is Barr's most ambitious work, and for about 350 pages it works stunningly. In the final 50 pages it comes partially unglued-one of the critical innocence-related plot threads gets dropped, and the behavior of some of the villains seems to have been altogether too convoluted, given their motives. For those reasons, I can't give the book a perfect score.
Bottom line: This is a very good book. But beware, it's darker than the normal Anna Pigeon fare, and the normally sunny landscapes of Barr's natural world share in the darkness.
Barr does not even begin to pull off the reality of Anna's waitress character's relationships to young people, as anyone who works with such an age group can see right through. The one, really believable character, Lorraine Knight, is MIA at times that prove unrealistic. Is anyone really surprised by the "ringleader" of the drug gang? Any mystery reader can figure that out pretty early on. Add to this ad naseum chase scenes, and this definitely is one of Anna's most forgetable adventures in one of America's most unforgetable parks!
Even with that, I wouldn't miss reading any of Barr's Pigeon books. We all have our 'bad days', and, regardless of how outrageous the plot can be, Barr always shows us the wonderful, human and evolutionary side of Anna Pigeon!
Certainly in "High Country", we get another unusual setting -- California's (apparently) oft-gloomy Yosemite National Park. We find Anna on temporary assignment here looking into the mysterious (and likely, criminal) disappearance of four young Park employees. Her "cover" is working as a waitress at one of the Park hotel restaurants -- to our thinking, a regrettable choice as Anna's questioning and probing sessions with just about everybody label her not as a busybody, but some sort of spy. Thus all the events at the hotel were marred by what at best is a flawed premise. When Anna gets outdoors and goes hunting for either the missing persons or the probable suspects, things improve; but it seemed like it took an awful long hiking story (and a lot of pages) to get us closer to the real plot and story line of the novel. Several readers have complained the story ("drug plane crashes into lake") is based on a true-life event (without any hint from the author); it does have a ring of familiarity about it.
The last few Anna Pigeon tales have seemed to fall short of the entertaining earlier entries in the set. Maybe as Anna continues to age, perhaps somewhat ungracefully, so do her exploits. Perhaps letting her retire would be a wise step after the current contract expires. Hopefully Barr can land a couple more gems before that happens.
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