Flashback
Anna Pigeon Mysteries Book 11
Book 11 of the Anna Pigeon Mystery Series — a thriller set at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas.
Park ranger Anna Pigeon has just been proposed to — and her answer is to run as far as possible. She ends up at Dry Tortugas National Park on Garden Key, a tiny scrap of land 70 miles west of Key West, almost entirely consumed by the massive brick walls of Fort Jefferson. The previous supervisor was put on medical leave after starting to see things. Anna wonders if she’s next.
The book weaves two timelines: a present-day mystery involving a burned-out boat and unidentifiable body parts found in the surrounding waters, and a Civil War-era storyline told through a bundle of letters Anna’s sister sends her — written by a great-great-aunt who lived at the fort in 1865 when it was a military prison holding Confederate prisoners and, most notoriously, one of the conspirators in Lincoln’s assassination.
Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon series is set across the national park system, with each book deeply rooted in the atmosphere of its location.
Thoughts from a Looper:
If there’s a perfect book to read anchored at the Dry Tortugas, this is it.
Alison read Flashback while anchored there aboard SV Fika, with the looming mass of Fort Jefferson visible from the boat each night and the constant, unsettling chorus of sooty terns overhead. The sooty tern colony nests on Bush Key, just a stone’s throw from the anchorage — and if you didn’t know, sooty terns are one of the only seabirds that almost never lands. They spend years at a time on the wing, only touching ground to breed. That eerie, never-ending hum of thousands of birds that barely touch the earth, combined with the rocking of the boat and the dark silhouette of the old fort after sunset, made this book genuinely nerve-wracking to read.
The atmosphere Barr creates inside the novel mirrors exactly what you experience outside it. Fort Jefferson has that quality — it’s beautiful and strange and historically heavy in a way that gets under your skin. Reading a mystery set inside the fort while anchored next to it is an experience that’s hard to replicate anywhere else on the Loop.
No prior experience with the Anna Pigeon series is needed — each book stands alone. But if you enjoy this one, there are 18 more set across the national park system.
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