Rating: 
Summary: One of her best!
Review: What a truly spell binding book. I loved the story within a story format. I had never heard of "Dry Tortugas National Park" and enjoyed the background of history almost as much as the exciting stories. Nevada just keeps getting better with each book.
Rating: 
Summary: This is not the Anna Pigeon we all know and love
Review: When National Park Service ranger Anna Pigeon starts wearing dresses, that's a clue, or maybe more than a clue, a loudly whispered hint, that big change is on the way. That particular dress (I remember it well because she donned it in last year's HUNTING SEASON) was red and she wore it to church --- a defiance of tradition that was in true Anna spirit, which helped; the patent leather heels didn't. And now we have FLASHBACK, which in spirit and atmosphere is dangerously close to...well...southern gothic.FLASHBACK is half contemporary Anna Pigeon series mystery and half Civil War historical mystery --- and both halves suffer from this uneven marriage. Anna has accepted a sudden, temporary assignment as Acting Supervisor of Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas National Park. The Dry Tortugas are claustrophobically small islands out in the Atlantic, 70 miles east of Key West. She's taking the place of a man who is having psychiatric inpatient care after suffering from hallucinations and other nasty symptoms of temporary, or permanent, insanity. Anna has snapped up this post in order to avoid thinking about a proposal of marriage, back "home" in Natchez Trace. Fort Jefferson was built in the mid-19th century and is a truly creepy place to this very day, in spite of current air conditioning and a few other modern improvements. By an enormous plot coincidence, just as she's settling in for her assignment of unknown duration, Anna receives a bunch of old letters from her sister Molly, the psychiatrist in New York. It seems that Molly and Anna have a dead relation whose husband was stationed at Fort Jefferson during and immediately after the Civil War. In the fashion of the times, the husband as commanding officer brought his wife and her younger sister with him to the Fort. The wife's letters to yet another sister back home constitute the historical part of this book. The contemporary mystery is considerably more up-to-date, with drug money, Cuban immigrants, boat explosions and such. If it were not for a spillover of language --- passive constructions, irritating adverbs, etc. --- from the historical part into Anna Pigeon's part, the things happening in the present could easily stand alone and hold our attention. Midway through the book, Anna confronts her own demons in a way that will have her faithful fans cheering, when she figures out that someone is slipping drugs into her bottled water (remember, she's on an island, so bottled water is not the luxury it might seem otherwise). Ergo, it's altogether possible that the Supervisory Ranger she's replacing didn't go nuts, but that he was drugged too. The question, of course, is why and who. The historical story is ingenious, if tedious. Barr has concocted a scenario in which three of the men who were convicted of treason in the assassination of President Lincoln have been sent to serve out their prison sentences at Fort Jefferson, which has not seen active duty as a military outpost and is serving as a prison instead. Primary among the conspirators is the infamous Dr. Samuel Mudd (as in "his name is mud", which more accurately for the time would have read "his name is Mudd" -- the man is the origin of the once-common expression), who preys upon the youngest of the two sisters, Anna's relations. To Barr's credit, her research and reproduction of the conditions at the historic fort are both impeccable. My cavil is with the writing style and, in particular, with its spillover into the rest of the book. Also, due to the truncation of the old-letters format, the characterizations in this part of the book suffer. Somehow the juxtaposition of Anna with her ancestor Raffia (real name, Raffaela) manages to work to the detriment of both, even though the author most likely intended to point up their differences in Anna's favor. The elements that have worked so well for previous Anna Pigeon novels are scarce but present, and they still work. For example, the underwater scenes in FLASHBACK, while nowhere near as chilling as those in A SUPERIOR DEATH (where Anna also spends a lot of time underwater), are excellent and will scare the swim fins off you. Dry Tortugas Park is lovingly and faithfully portrayed. All the characters in the contemporary chapters are fully drawn, interesting people presented in such a way that you are curious to know what drives them. But the unevenness with which the book proceeds is unsettling and the cliffhanger chapters (a gothic convention) are especially tiresome. What we have here may simply be a good author who is champing at the bit of her own successful series, wanting to break out into something else and her editors are indulging her (while not editing). FLASHBACK is, after all, the 11th Anna Pigeon book and Nevada Barr's 12th published novel. Yet readers want the Anna they know and love and, aye, there's the rub. I expect I'm not alone in my discomfort with Anna wearing dresses and going to church and, for heaven's sake, maybe even getting married to a sheriff who's also an ordained Episcopal priest (and who, mercifully, is in this book only at a distance). OK, so real people grow and change, especially as they age. So why is it irritating when a series character does the same in fiction? Well because, see, it's fiction and that's why we read it --- because it's not real life and so we can get justice and other important yearned-for stuff. Nevada Barr is a talented writer. I will read her next book, no matter what it is. But please oh please, if it's about Anna Pigeon, let her leave the girlie dresses home in the closet. --- Reviewed by Ava Dianne Day
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