Nevada Barr (born March 1, 1952, Yerington, Nevada) is an American author best known for her Anna Pigeon series of mystery novels set in national parks in the United States. Barr won an Agatha Award and Anthony Award for best first novel for Track of the Cat. She lives in New Orleans.
Although Barr was born in Nevada, she was named not after her state of birth but after a character in one of her father’s favorite books. She grew up in Johnstonville, California, and finished college at the University of California, Irvine. With a masters degree in drama, she pursued a career in theater,TV, films, commercials and voice work for almost two decades.
When her then-director husband changed careers and became interested in the environmental movement she began working as a seasonal park ranger in the summer.
Barr created the Anna Pigeon series while working at her second seasonal job in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas. Pigeon is a law enforcement ranger with the United States National Park Service. The books in the series take place in various national parks, where Pigeon solves murders that are often related to natural resource issues.
Barr's first permanent Park Ranger job was on the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi. She resigned to focus on writing when her books began to achieve commercial success.
Barr has published three other books besides the Anna Pigeon series:
, a lesbian historical novel set in the days of the Western frontier.
Anna Pigeon is a fictional park ranger and detective in the series of novels by the same name. She shares some life experiences with the author such working as a national park ranger and having had a husband who worked in the theatre in NYC. The character of Anna is middle aged, small and wiry, and wears her graying hair in a long braid. She is the widow of an actor who was killed by a taxi crossing the street in NYC. She remarried a minister named Paul Davidson, who is also a sheriff. She has one sister Molly, a NYC therapist, whose husband, Frederick, is a retired FBI agent..