Reading mystery novels is a guilty pleasure. More respectable, certainly, than tuning in to the Jerry Springer Show or Temptation Island.

        But still. Most of the time when somebody is asked what they are reading, they claim to be re-reading the classics. Or some non-fiction treatise on organic truck farming. Or a fascinating history of Etruscan coins. Anything but a good old-fashioned mystery.

        So, you have to wonder who is reading the millions of mysteries sold every year. How do they wind up on The New York Times best-seller list?

        There is hope for the information snob with a stealthy jones for a good whodunit: Nevada Barr. Reading one of her Anna Pigeon mysteries is like folding the laundry with NPR in the background. You can accidentally soak up some actual information while you're doing something else.
       

Glimpses of natural gifts

               In her latest, Blood Lure, it's bears and hiking Ms. Barr teaches us about. Ranger Anna Pigeon is on a tracking mission, retrieving grizzly bear DNA from hair traps. “We're talking off-trail hiking here,” the scientist heading up the project tells Anna. “Bush-whacking at its whackingest.”

        Woven through Ms. Barr's customary crisp plot, characters you'd bother to worry about and honest clues left in plain sight are beautifully wrought glimpses into our country's natural gifts. And a primer on developing the skills to appreciate them. All this, painlessly delivered.

        Before this, we learned about SCUBA diving in A Superior Death and spelunking in Blind Descent.Now, it's the mating and stalking habits of grizzly bears. Like her protagonist Anna Pigeon, Ms. Barr has worked as a National Park Service ranger and she writes about this country's natural resources with authority and respect.

        “There was nothing in the air but air. Not the cloying touch of the moisture of the south, not the putrid undercurrent of a city's stink, not the bracing tang of salt from the seashore.”

        And it is clear that she has tasted them all.

        This time, she hikes the rugged back country of Waterton/Glacier National Peace Park, which straddles the border between Montana and Canada. Armed with a noxious brew of “equal parts cows' blood and fish flotsam, heated and left to steep for two and a half months,” she and bear researcher Joan Rand, “apparently born without a gag reflex,” go in search of these volatile beasts. In a terrifying late-night attack they instead become hunted.

        Anna escapes with a slight wound — a scrape from a giant bear claw. Meanwhile, a woman at another campsite turns up dead with her neck broken and the flesh peeled away with a knife — clearly the work of the creatures Anna generally finds most sinister, human beings. This time, however, the sometimes seemingly nerveless ranger is caught between nature's danger and the manmade kind.

        A nearby camp turns up a troupe of strangers with tangled relationships. This time, the setting is so remote that Anna gives up the usual advantage of consultations with her shrink-sister Molly.
       

She's on her own

               Anna Pigeon snoops with a kind of gallant grit readers have come to expect. Middle-aged and slightly built, she routinely carries a 50-pound pack and lives on slender rations. On top of that, she makes her way competently through government red tape and the male-dominated Park Service bureaucracy.

        Ms. Barr writes her women tough.

        Her mother, Mary Barr, was a carpenter, mechanic and pilot who ran a little mountain airport with Nevada Barr's father. The author, who worked as an actress before joining the park service herself, wrote her first Anna Pigeon mystery in 1993.

        The Track of the Cat won several prestigious writing awards, and Ms. Barr has followed it with eight others, all set in different national parks, all offering up an astonishing amount of natural science.

        This one lives up to all the others, although I'm proud to say I figured out the murder just ahead of Anna. Of course, she was nursing a wound sustained in a bear attack and living on trail grub. Her clues were strung out over several days' time. She was drinking tepid water from a bottle and nursing fear. Dodging bullets and bears.

        I had the advantage of an all-night read, fortified by Graeter's chocolate mint ice cream and designer coffee. I was untroubled by guilt. And left with only the pleasure.

        Blood, gore, intrigue. And a respectable dollop of information.
       

SIGNING

               Nevada Barr will discuss and sign Blood Lure 7 p.m. next Tuesday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Edwards and Madison roads, Norwood, 396-8960; and 7 p.m. Feb. 21 at Books & Co., 350 E. Stroop Road, Kettering (937) 298-6540.

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