Maria Lynn Barrs lived a hard, difficult life before she earned a high school equivalence diploma and a college degree to become first a television reporter, then a news director. She conveys these strengths in her debut novel with The Wild Rose Press, Parallel Secrets. Vicky Robeson, a former television reporter, survives a tragic childhood and uses her reporter’s gifts for interviewing and fact finding to solve the mystery of a missing child in a small Missouri town.

With probing questions and sharp intuition, Vicky ties together another story of female trafficking 9 years before. After threats to her life by a car bomb, a failed hit and run on the highway and numerous murderous gunshot efforts, Vicky uncovers a complicated network of evil. Vicky manages to show developing friendships and community strengths despite guarded multi-generation secrets and enmities. I recommend this rip-roaring mystery about child trafficking. Congratulations ML Barrs.

I’ve never been to Texas, east, west north or south, or, truth be told, wanted to go there, until reading Track of the Cat by Nevada Barr, a fictional environmental mystery.

To escape memories of a lost love, Anna Pigeon becomes a National Park Ranger where she pursues justice and dangers in the wilds of nature. In Tracks of the Cat, she is a ranger in the Guadalupe National Park in west Texas.

Anna watches an eight legged tarantula walk past her in a dry canyon, a hint that Anna is a passionate defender of wild life, even including tarantulas. Alerted by vultures circling in the sky, she plows through saw grass, each strand with sawtooth-edged blades cutting her arms to find Sheila Drury, a dead fellow ranger, with wounds meant to look like lion kill. Convinced that the ranger had not been killed by lions, Anna is determined to find justice plus prevent the mass of vigilante killing of the cougars that would take place with the news of the dead ranger.

After a ranger disappearance, Anna travels alone. “Across the flats, to where the desert begins to wrinkle back on itself, the mesquite and ocotillo etched the arid soil with dusty green. Low cacti, invisible at the distance, replaced the greenery as the hills folded into sharp rigids and ravine.”

As Anna’s suspicions mount, she goes out, again alone, to catch the villains. She sets up a lookout station. “Thursday night the moon rose full and round at 9:12 p.m. Anna was waiting for it. The light came first, a faint silvery glow on the bottom of a few ragged clouds left from the afternoon’s fruitless thunderheads. Then, a dome, slightly flattened, pushed up into the saddle between El Capitan and Guadalupe Peak. Fainthearted stars faded from sight. Cool colorless light poured down the park’s western escarpment, rolled out like liquid silver across a ravine-torn desert to pool black under the brambles of the mesquite and shine in cholla needles.”

With such lyrical passages, Nevada Barr takes her readers into the wilds of nature, a trip I recommend. I traveled with Anna Pigeon in the Guadalupe National Park with curiosity about a world I do not know. I look forward to exploring further trips to national parks with her.