ENDANGERED SPECIES

If you've been waiting for Park Services ranger Anna Pigeon to get a posting on the East Coast, you'll be happy to know that she's unofficially moonlighting as midwife to some endangered loggerhead turtles while she's working for a presuppression fire crew in Georgia's Cumberland Island National Seashore. But the fire that's started by the crash of a Beechcraft airplane is a routine problem compared to the death of the two men who were aboard the plane: Slattery Hammond, who was on freelance drug patrol, and district ranger Todd Belfore, who leaves behind a very pregnant wife and a shorthanded park staff to deal with a dozen riddles. Why did Slattery follow Todd from the wide-open spaces of the North Cascades to the shallows of Cumberland? Why was Tabby Belfore afraid her husband would leave her? Why did somebody knock out Anna as she searched Slattery's place, and use an inoffensive Austrian camper's leg for target practice? What were a pair of plastic sandwich bags doing floating inside the Beechcraft's fuel tank? Anna wishes her FBI lover Frederick Stanton were with her to help piece together this puzzle. But he won't even answer his phone in Chicago, because he's in New York, falling in love with Anna's sister Molly. Anna's fifth isn't as baffling or dramatically urgent as the remarkable Firestorm (1996), but it is as poetically written and exquisitely clued as any of the others.