When the body of Doyce Barnett turns up in unsavory circumstances in Mississippi"s Natchez Trace National Park, district ranger Anna Pigeon finds her investigation stymied at every turn. The dead man"s brother, an undertaker with a secret that"s been kept by three generations of his family, will do anything to protect it, even if his cover-up puts Anna"s life in danger. Her own deputy, jealous because she got the job he wanted, seems to be sabotaging her case in order to advance his political ambitions. A bunch of Mississippi good old boys who"ve been poaching on park territory are gunning for her, and something strange is going on in a slave cemetery that"s also in her bailiwick. In this, her 10th outing, the prickly, ever-likable Ranger Pigeon puts all the pieces together in a lively, well-paced mystery that evokes two dimensions of the Deep South: its lush beauty and its tangled racial history, dimensions that, as Anna herself puts it, are "both a balm. History because its sins had already been committed, nature because she was supremely indifferent to the petty hysterias of the human race." --Jane Adams