Book description
Time is not on Faye Longchamp's side. She and her husband Joe are
working near the mouth of the Mississippi, researching archaeological
sites soon to be swamped by oil. The Deepwater Horizon disaster has
morphed her run-of-the-mill contract job into a task that might swamp
her fledgling company. It isn't helping that an injured babysitter has
left Faye to work with a toddler underfoot. An adolescent girl is drawn
to Faye, perhaps because she idolizes the confident archaeologist. Young
Amande is bright and curious, and a poverty-stricken life on a houseboat
with an eccentric grandmother doesn't look like a good to get the
education Amande deserves. When the girl's grandmother and her
no-account uncle are murdered, her prospects worsen. With only two
known relatives-neither of them much more respectable than the dead
uncle-Amande seems destined for neglect or worse. Soon, Faye and Joe
find themselves among people fighting hard for Amande's pathetic
inheritance: a raggedy houseboat, a few shares of stock, and a
hurricane-battered island that's not even inhabitable. Pirate-era
silver coins are found and disappear. Shadowing it all is the fact that
there's a murderer on the loose. But why should Faye be surprised by
such shady events, here in these watery lands settled by the greatest
pirates of them all? And the oil slick looms, because this country is
still being plundered, after all these years… Mary Anna Evans is the
author of the award-winning Faye Longchamp archaeological
mysteries-Artifacts, Relics, Effigies, Findings, Floodgates, and
Strangers. She has degrees in physics and chemical engineering. Her
background includes stints in environmental consulting and university
administration, as well as a summer spent working offshore in the oil
fields. Writing lets her spend weeks indulging her passion for history,
archaeology, and architecture, and months making up stories. Mary Anna
lives in Florida with her three children and a cat.
