She finished college at the University of California, Irvine. She grew up in Johnstonville, California. Barr has won an Agatha Award for best first novel for Track of the Cat.īarr was named after the state of her birth. Nevada Barr is a mystery fiction author, known for her 'Anna Pigeon' series of mysteries, set in National Parks in the United States. 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. A tangled web that was woven before she arrived begins to threaten her sanity and her life. 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. When her sister, Molly, sends her a packet of letters from her 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.

Here, on this last lick of the United States, in a giant crumbling fortress, Anna has little company except for an occasional sunburned tourist or unruly shrimper. 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. 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.

Flashback by nevada barr