{"id":1280,"date":"2014-03-01T13:04:38","date_gmt":"2014-03-01T19:04:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1280"},"modified":"2014-03-01T13:04:38","modified_gmt":"2014-03-01T19:04:38","slug":"nevada-barr-destroyer-angel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/nevada-barr-destroyer-angel\/","title":{"rendered":"Nevada Barr: Destroyer Angel"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I haven\u2019t checked in with Anna Pigeon in a few books and I see she\u2019s gotten married (congrats, Anna!) and she seems to have morphed into a Jack Reacher-of-the-woods.\u00a0 In this book she\u2019s the coolest, most badass character you can imagine.\u00a0 I was absolutely unable to stop reading.<\/p>\n

\"Destroyer-Angel\"<\/a>Anna has taken a bit of time away from her spouse to spend a weekend with the \u201cgirls\u201d \u2013 two women her own age and their teenage daughters.\u00a0 One of the women, Heath, is almost as badass as Anna herself, though she\u2019s paralyzed from the waist down.\u00a0 She and her daughter Elizabeth, or \u201cE,\u201d have a good relationship and E seems like a very level headed teen.\u00a0 They\u2019ve brought their dog, Wily, with them.<\/p>\n

The other mother, Leah, is a brainiac in the Sheldon Cooper mode.\u00a0 She\u2019s smart but not so great with people, including her spoiled princess of a daughter, Katie, who is thirteen.\u00a0 Leah is working on handicap accessible camping equipment \u2013 canoes, tents, chairs \u2013 and Heath is her test pilot.\u00a0 They\u2019re camping on the Fox River in Northern Minnesota and Anna takes off on her own one fateful evening in a canoe to enjoy the stars and moon and decompress.<\/p>\n

As she\u2019s returning to camp she hears shouts and knows something is up, so she hides in the woods and watches in horror as she realizes her friends are being taken hostage.\u00a0 To illustrate how truly nasty they are, they even fling the dog at a tree, leaving him for dead.\u00a0 If Barr had wanted to make the reader hate these guys more, that was certainly the way to do it.<\/p>\n

As Barr relentlessly pares the story down to the bad guys \u2013 a crew run by a truly scary guy they call the \u201cDude\u201d \u2013 and the good guys and how they are going to stay alive, you\u2019re feeling the tension on every page.\u00a0 It becomes apparent early on that they are after the wealthy Leah and her daughter; a kidnapping for ransom. Heath and E are saved when they tell them they have an ultra-wealthy relative, so they too are taken as kidnap victims.\u00a0 They also tell them \u2013 as the men seem to know how many were in the party \u2013 that Anna had to cancel at the last minute.\u00a0 She\u2019s certainly their ace in the hole.<\/p>\n

In many mystery novels, the puzzle seems impossible, no way to a solution.\u00a0 In a suspense novel, the best and most suspenseful ones really show no way for the characters to survive, which is the case here.\u00a0 As Leah retrofits Heath\u2019s wheelchair so they can get her through the woods to the point where they\u2019ll be picked up by a plane, their struggles to stay warm, fed, and alive are numerous.<\/p>\n

Only Anna, in her constant vigilance mode, can spot the weak spots and take advantage of them.\u00a0 She knows she\u2019s no match for four bad guys with weapons, so she has to even the odds, even sitting back out of sight when some truly horrific things happen to the women.\u00a0 She tells herself that she\u2019s in a war situation to justify what she has to do \u2013 and you\u2019ll agree she has to do them, though Barr certainly doesn\u2019t sugarcoat her actions.<\/p>\n

I really liked the feminist slant the story has \u2013 this is literally men against women, and the men certainly don\u2019t come out on top.\u00a0 As Anna, the avenging angel of the woods, works hard to save her friends, they help save themselves too, revealing strengths they didn\u2019t know they had.\u00a0 This book is a real thrill ride \u2013 of the thoughtful variety.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven\u2019t checked in with Anna Pigeon in a few books and I see she\u2019s gotten married (congrats, Anna!) and she seems to have morphed into a Jack Reacher-of-the-woods.\u00a0 In this book she\u2019s the coolest, most badass character you can imagine.\u00a0 I was absolutely unable to stop reading. Anna has taken a bit of time … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-1280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-suspensethriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1280"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1282,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions\/1282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}