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Fiction. Mystery. HTML: Faye Longchamp has lost nearly everything except for her quick mind and a grim determination to hang onto her ancestral home, Joyeuse, a moldering plantation hidden along the Florida coast. No one knows how Faye's great-great-grandmother Cally, a newly freed slave barely out of her teens, came to own Joyeuse in the aftermath of the Civil War. No one knows how her descendants hung onto it through Reconstruction, world wars, the Depression, and Jim Crow, but Faye has inherited the island plantation�??and the family tenacity. When the property taxes rise beyond her means, she sets out to save Joyeuse by digging for artifacts on her property and the surrounding National Wildlife Refuge and selling them on the black market. A tiny bit of that dead glory would pay a year's taxes. A big valuable chunk of the past would save her home forever. But instead of potsherds and arrowheads, she uncovers a woman's shattered skull, a Jackie Kennedy-style earring nestled against its bony cheek. Faye is torn. If she reports the forty-year-old murder, she'll reveal her illegal livelihood, thus risking jail and the loss of Joyeuse. She doesn't intend to let that happen, so she probes into the dead woman's history, unaware that the past is rushing up on her like a hurricane across deceptively calm Gulf waters...… (more)
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She earns most of her money doing black market archaeology and selling artifacts she discovers mostly on her family's land. She also has a job working for a dig run by one of her university professors. But when two of the student archaeologists are found murdered and buried, the dig is halted leaving Faye in even more need of money.
When she is digging in a previously unexplored corner of land, she discovers bones. These aren't ancient. She identifies an earring that was popular in the 1960s. However, since she was digging illegally, telling anyone about the body threatens all her secrets. So she decides to investigate on her own not knowing that the murderer is still around and wants his secrets to stay buried too.
I liked the multiple timelines that were woven together in this story. Faye discovers a diary that tells the stories of some of her ancestors who also lived in Joyeuse and those stories are woven into the contemporary story. Time also flashes back to when the girl whose bones Faye discovers lived and died.
I liked the variety of characters. I liked the Florida panhandle setting. I liked the added tension that a hurricane taking aim at them brings to the story too. I also like that this is the first of what is currently a twelve-book series.
Evans weaves in a multi-generational plantation history of Faye's home, Joyeuse Isle (cleverly named from a Debussy composition), perched on the hurricane-prone Gulf Coast of Florida.
Satisifying to feminists, history buffs, those with an interest in archeology and meteorology, and just plain old mystery lovers.
The author's background as a scientist, musician, and mom help her create a believable and well developed world full of characters to care about. Fans of Sue Grafton, PD James, and Sara Paretsky will enjoy this book.
I can hardly wait to read Relics, Faye's next adventure.
Faye who is an archeologist reveres the past and is doing her best to keep up the house but turbulent happenings are surrounding the once peaceful area. There have been murders of some local students and the bones of past murders have surfaced as well.
Fave and her companion on the island Joseph Mantooth are in murky water indeed as a storm develops in the gulf that threatens both the house and their lives, but the murderer on the loose is the more clear ad present danger.
I enjoyed the characters, the history and the Florida ambience.
I will be looking for the next in the series because I ended up caring about Faye, an archeologist who has had to do some things she hated in order to survive and Joe a Creek Indian, who is slow in book learning, but a genius in wilderness survival and living life simply.
A fast-paced addition to A Faye Longchamp Mystery series.
I look forward to reading the next installment!