Well, I suppose if your last name was Pigeon, you’d pretty much have to be a park ranger.

DEEP SOUTH and FLASHBACK, both by Nevada Barr, (Berkley, $6.99 and $7.99 paperback, respectively) follow the exploits of Anna Pigeon as she hops from national park to national park on the way up the government ladder.

DEEP SOUTH begins with the arrival of District Ranger Pigeon to the Natchez Trace in Mississippi. A girl pining for the desserts of the west, she is a thousand miles out of her comfort zone career-wise, terrain-wise and society-wise. Confronted with good ol’ boys, bad ol’ boys and a young girl murdered and dressed in a pseudo-KKK hood, Pigeon ain’t in Colorado no more. The characters are well-drawn and while a few fall back on southern stereotypes there are enough that don’t to gloss it over. The plot is fast paced, compelling and largely believable due to well-placed foreshadowing. Largely, right up to about chapter 17. Unfortunately, the wrap-it up ending relied too heavily on characters we didn’t know well and a twist that didn’t quite ring true. An unfortunate misstep in an otherwise superior novel. Superior enough that I ran right out and picked up FLASHBACK.

If DEEP SOUTH is a roller coaster, FLASHBACK is Pirates of the Carribean. Unsettling at first, having just read the former, I soon settled into the slower pace. This time temporarily assigned as supervisory ranger at the Dry Tortugas National Park seventy miles off Key West, Anna is taking over for the last guy who had, unfortunately, gone over the cuckoo’s nest – way over. The park is a lot of water and a few small islands, but the largest attraction is Fort Jefferson on Garden Key used primarily during the Civil War as a prison. Her arrival at Fort Jefferson coincides – perhaps a bit too coincidentally – with the arrival of a packet of letters written by her aunt many generations passed who was stationed with her husband at Fort Jefferson shortly after the assassination of President Lincoln. It isn’t long before two sunken boats, a wounded ranger and a couple of dead bodies complicate life on Garden Key, made all the more difficult as Anna herself starts to go a bit squirrelly. Chapters alternate between the letters of the aunt who is having her own troubles with traitor prisoners, a distant husband and a headstrong young sister and the modern-day events at Fort Jefferson. While FLASHBACK isn’t the rip-roaring ride of DEEP SOUTH it is more carefully constructed and has an ending that, while a bit over the top, is much more believable and satisfying. And the integration of past and present works remarkably well, their endings tying together nicely.

Ranger Pigeon and Nevada Barr are definitely going in my read-everything-that-comes-out pile.