Blind Descent

Anna Pigeon, a National Park Service ranger, goes underground when a fellow ranger is hurt in a caving accident in Lechuguilla, a cave in New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns system. Anna fights down her claustrophobia and joins the rescue team.

The route to the injured woman runs 800 feet below the surface. Anna works her way through airless tunnels, open pits, huge caverns and silent underground rivers. Each obstacle has a forbidding name, among them Razor Blade Run and the Wormhole.

This is a wilderness mystery that follows five earlier novels about Anna. The setting is the main hazard, a cave described as a man-eating monster, and the book is built around confinement, darkness and the physical strain of the climb down.

When Anna finally reaches her friend, the injured ranger tells her the fall was no accident. Someone wants her dead, and that person is drawing Anna deeper into the dark, farther from daylight than she has ever gone. The question is who is down there with her, and whether she can get out.