With summer on the way, I’m longing to hit the road to explore more national parks. I wanted to round up my favorite mysteries with female protagonists that are set in and near these wild places so we can all enjoy some dreaming and, hopefully, planning for outdoor adventures.
Included here are two series featuring park rangers, a standalone led by a senior PI and one book in a series with a protagonist who searches for people long missing. Heads up that these generally contain more explicit violence than a typical cozy.
Track of the Cat by Nevada Barr
Barr, who worked as a park ranger in some of the places where she sets her books, is the grande dame of the national park mystery. She started in 1993 with Track of the Cat, introducing us to Anna Pigeon, 39, a law enforcement ranger for the U.S. National Park Service. The debut is set in Guadalupe Mountains National Park in West Texas where Anna, returning from a solo research trip, discovers the body of another female ranger in the sharp saw grass of a natural pool. Authorities decide it’s a lion kill but Anna believes the clues point elsewhere, to an animal whose motive is financial greed.
Barr has now written 19 books in the series, each set in a different national park or monument area (the Statute of Liberty is one) across the country. In each, we see Anna fiercely battling to solve a mystery that often incorporates environmental and social issues. We’re also treated to gorgeous descriptions that illuminate the history, flora and wildlife of the parks and their importance to American life. I highly recommend choosing a book by location to learn more about any area you’re planning to visit.
Celine by Peter Heller
Heller is well known for his books set in natural places, such as The River and The Last Ranger, but Celine, published in 2017, is his first mystery with a female protagonist. And what a protagonist she is! Celine, 69, is a Sarah Lawrence grad whose family is listed in The Social Register and who grew up partly in Paris and partly in New York. But she’s battled plenty of her own demons and that history has led her to work as a private investigator, focusing on reuniting birth families. In this standalone mystery, Celine is still recovering from the loss of her sisters and the trauma of being in New York on 9/11 when she’s contacted by a woman whose father, a nature photographer, went missing long ago. The action takes us to Yellowstone National Park, where Celine and her husband/partner Pete, aka The Quiet American, unravel this twisty tale that goes all the way up to the highest ranks of federal power.
I adored Celine as I made clear in my earlier review. So far, there’s no sign of a sequel. Note that Heller dedicated this book to his mother Caroline, “Artist, Spiritual Warrior, Private Eye.”
One Step Too Far by Lisa Gardner
This series features Frankie Elkin, a recovering alcoholic and “average, middle-aged white woman,” who travels from one long-cold missing persons case to another. In this book, the second in the series, Frankie is in Wyoming, where she joins a group searching the Popo Agie Wilderness in Shoshone National Forest for a hiker missing for five years. One of the pleasures of this series is watching Frankie, a perpetual outsider, sink into her surroundings as detailed by Gardner, whose rich descriptions bring them to life. In this case, we also learn more about the many people who go missing in our national forests — at least 1,600 as of the book’s 2022 publication — and are never found.
My love for this series is documented in my earlier review. This is the most graphic of the books in this review, so be prepared. Frankie and her searchers encounter far more than they expect in the wilderness, where the most deadly animals turn out to kill on two legs. That said, Gardner’s pacing is superb and there’s some humor, mostly in the form of an affable Sasquatch hunter, to leaven the darkness.
A Murder in Zion by Nicole Maggi
There’s a lot going on in Emmeline “Emme” Helliwell’s life, including her mother’s death, a sister she can’t find, and the bungling of a case for the Investigative Services Branch of the National Park Service. Emme has given her two weeks’ notice to the park service, intent on taking over her mother’s bakery, when a childhood friend is found dead in Zion National Park, that park in southern Utah where Emme and her sister spent much of their childhood exploring. Emme agrees to work on the case with the time left on her contract and is soon drawn into what looks like a connection to an earlier murder — a death she believes she should have prevented. And it’s all tied to a religious cult in a nearby town.
Published in March 2025, this book is billed as a National Park Mystery and it’s received a number of accolades. Still, it’s unclear if Maggi, the author of several standalone thrillers, will be making this a series. Maggi’s love of Zion is evident in her detailed descriptions of the park and she takes care in describing how the rangers keep the park, and its visitors, safe. I’m hoping for a sequel.
For those of us who love our national parks, cuts to staffing and budget from the current administration are damaging these beautiful spaces. To learn more about what’s happening, please visit and consider supporting the Alt National Park Service. You can also follow them on Bluesky at @altnps.bsky.social.
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