Book description
Centuries of tragedy shadow New Orleans-wars, slavery, and a monumental
flood that killed a thousand people and still threatens to wash all that
history away. Faye Longchamp and her team of archaeologists, fighting to
save New Orleans' past, are horrified when they discover a corpse that's
far too new to be an archaeological find. The police presume it's just
another dead body in the long, sad sequence of dead bodies left by
Hurricane Katrina, until Faye shows them a truth that only an
archaeologist could see: the debris piled on top of the dead woman is
all wrong. Someone brought Shelly Broussard to this flooded-out house
and left her dead body behind. Presumably, that someone was her killer.
Faye and her assistant Joe Wolf Mantooth are drawn into the
investigation by a detective who believes their professional expertise
is critical to the case. They quickly learn that trouble swirled around
the victim like winds around the still, quiet eye of a hurricane. Is
Shelly's heroic rescue work in the aftermath of Katrina the key to her
death? Or does the sheaf of photos in her work files hold the answer?
Will Faye and Joe be the next innocents engulfed in this deadly
deception? At the outset of Evans's engaging if somewhat thinly
plotted fourth mystery to feature archeologist Faye Longchamp (after
2008's Findings), Faye and her team are excavating a plantation site
outside New Orleans, next to the battlefield where Andrew Jackson's army
defeated the British in 1815. When students doing post-Katrina cleanup
find the remains of what appears to be a drowning victim from the
hurricane, a dumbbell resting atop the pelvis suggests foul play to
Faye. The police ask Faye and her fiancé, Joe Wolf Mantooth, to assist
in what becomes a murder investigation, the victim having been
identified as a fellow archeologist, Shelly Broussard, who worked with
rescue teams after the storm. Passages from a book about the Katrina
disaster by a local author and extracts from the memoirs of a
19th-century military engineer provide insights and historical
perspective. Faye's landlady, a part-time voodoo-mambo or priestess,
adds spice. 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.
