Lake

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that every so often I set myself a writing challenge – for several reasons, but I guess it’s mostly to keep my writing hand in while I’m editing something else, to keep that creativity going. I’ve also mentioned that I had Google create a list of twenty random words and have been writing to each of the suggestions,, and now I’m on #18 Lake. |In some ways that sounds like quite an interesting and comparatively easy start word – so many things spring to mind suggested by the idea of a lake. However I’d written one last year which involved a lake which was a spooky sort of a tale, and that kept creeping into my mind.

I took a break from it and wrote something else, but coming back to it yet another also written story kept nudging me. This was not something I had written, but a book by a favourite author, Nevada Barr. Nevada is an American author (you might have guessed that from her name), who has written a series of novels about a law enforcement ranger working in the US National park service. Anna, her main character moves from park to park on different assignments, and each time comes across murder and mystery. They are clever, intriguing, very interesting, and sometimes quite scary. “A Superior Death” is set on Lake Superior

Isle Royale National Park is a national park of the United States consisting of Isle Royale, along with more than 400 small adjacent islands and the surrounding waters of Lake Superior, in Michigan. Isle Royale is 45 miles long and 9 miles wide, with an area of 206.73 square miles, making it the fourth-largest lake island in the world. In addition, it is the largest natural island in Lake Superior, the second-largest island in the Great Lakes (after Manitoulin Island), the third-largest in the contiguous United States (after Long Island and Padre Island), and the 33rd-largest island in the United States.
Wikipedia

The novel is quite gruesome, but gives a vivid idea of the lake and the surrounding area. It’s an intriguing tale although I did get a little lost in the telling:

Park ranger Anna Pigeon returns, in a mystery that unfolds in and around Lake Superior, in whose chilling depths sunken treasure comes with a deadly price. In her latest mystery, Nevada Barr sends Ranger Pigeon to a new post amid the cold, deserted, and isolated beauty of Isle Royale National Park, a remote island off the coast of Michigan known for fantastic deep-water dives of wrecked sailing vessels. Leaving behind memories of the Texas high desert and the environmental scam she helped uncover, Anna is adjusting to the cool damp of Lake Superior and the spirits and lore of the northern Midwest. But when a routine application for a diving permit reveals a grisly underwater murder, Anna finds herself 260 feet below the forbidding surface of the lake, searching for the connection between a drowned man and an age-old cargo ship. Written with a naturalist’s feel for the wilderness and a keen understanding of characters who thrive in extreme conditions, A Superior Death is a passionate, atmospheric page-turner.

By the way, so far, my story is nothing like Nevada Barr’s – although people do go out on a lake in a small cruiser, and something unexpected does happen…