Book description
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... Mary Anna Evans has degrees in
physics and engineering, but her heart is in the past. Her series
character, Faye Longchamp, lives the exciting life of an archaeologist,
and Mary Anna envies her a little. Mary Anna's award-winning series of
Faye's adventures includes Artifacts, Relics, Effigies, Findings,
Floodgates, Strangers and, new in 2011, Plunder.
