Hard Truth by Nevada Barr
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"She held [the flashlight] backward and the light blasted her retinas. Startled, she dropped it. Found it. Pointed it in the right direction. "Holy shit," she whispered.
Then the screaming began."

Hard Truth (2005), another National Parks series mystery by Nevada Barr, is the weakest of the five installments I have read so far. In fact, I actively dislike the ending of the novel, badly written and simply in bad taste. Until about page 235 (out of 320) it seems an interesting and worthwhile addition to the series. The story is located in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, where Anna Pigeon is now employed as a district ranger. But then, towards the end of the story, the writing dissolves into pornography of violence.

Three young girls have gone missing in Rocky Mountains National Park six weeks ago, and the intense search has not yielded any results. But now a paraplegic climber, "handicamping" in the park with her aunt comes across two girls, disheveled and covered in mud, feces, and blood. The girls are incommunicative and in a state of shock. When the parents - members of a conservative Christian sect - are notified, instead of being extremely happy, they all lawyer up and prohibit their daughters from being tested for rape and questioned by psychologists or police. Ms. Pigeon is having difficulties in fulfilling her law enforcement duties - finding the third girl - because the parents suspect the involvement of Satan. The whole affair acquires a different flavor when Ms Pigeon finds evidence that someone has been torturing animals. The possibility of a brutal series killer cannot be excluded either.

The absurdly prolonged ending with its barrage of gratuitous violence and brutality overwhelms the reader. It is not just that the scenes of mental and physical torture are excessive but they are also badly written. In High Country Ms. Barr wrote great, captivating scenes of a prolonged ferocious duel between a good person and a bad one. Here the passages depicting brutality are simultaneously disgusting and ridiculous. For instance, a character repeatedly stabbed with a knife and just about to die is glad about the cordovan-colored socks they are wearing as they do not show how much blood is being lost because of their color. Cringeworthy and embarrassing for this usually competent author.

I also wish Ms. Barr wrote more about the Rocky Mountain National Park, which my wife and I visited just a year ago (our thirty-second National Park). The author does know how to write about nature, which she proved in other books in the series. Instead of just mentioning the names such as Sprague Lake, Loomis Lake or Deer Mountain I would love to read more about these wonderful places, with similar skill as the author has exhibited before.

I will probably look for more National Park series mysteries by Ms. Barr, but I am unable to recommend this one.

Two stars.

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