Artifacts (Faye Longchamp Mysteries, No. 1) - Softcover

Evans, Mary Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590580796 ISBN 13: 9781590580790

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press, 2011

Synopsis

2004 - Benjamin Franklin Award for Mystery/Suspense

"A haunting, atmospheric story." -P.J. Parrish, New York Times bestselling author

Faye Longchamp has lost nearly everything except her determination to hang onto 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 or how her descendants hung onto it through Reconstruction, world wars, the Depression, and Jim Crow. But Faye has inherited 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 selling them on the black market.

But instead of pot shards and arrowheads, she uncovers a woman's shattered skull. If Faye reports the 40-year-old murder, she'll reveal her illegal livelihood, risk jail...and Joyeuse. So she probes into the dead woman's history, unaware that the past is rushing toward her like a hurricane across deceptively calm Gulf waters....

About this title

From the Author

I have always had a guilty passion for antebellum Southern domestic architecture, particularly in remote areas of the Deep South where traditional building materials of the time, like stone and cast iron and exotic wood, weren’t available and had to be "faked" by the use of carved cypress, handmade bricks, even mud and Spanish moss. The problem with these audacious homes is obvious: they were built by slave labor. I wanted to write a book that featured such a house—that gave it the status almost equal to that of the human characters. But how would any reader sympathize with a character who had inherited a mansion built by prisoners? Well, if the mansion was one step away from utter ruin and its owner was a descendant of the slaves that built it, maybe a reader would indeed care what happened to them. And that is how Faye and Joyeuse were born.

I did not intend Artifacts to have a strong romantic theme, so I created Joe to be the ideal sidekick for an independent woman. Kind, strong, and, yes, good-looking, but not Faye’s type. In my experience, intelligent women are attracted to intelligent men, so Joe was intended to be Faye’s true friend, but only that. Yet many people, women and men, have demanded to know why she doesn’t date him. Heck, most of them think she should marry him on the spot. I think Joe took on a life of his own as I wrote Artifacts, and every writer dreams of finding a character like that. He is more than I intended him to be. Will Faye ever notice his stellar qualities? That, my friends is another story—and another book (or two or three) entirely.

About the Author

Mary Anna Evans is the author of the Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries, which have received recognition including the Benjamin Franklin Award, the Mississippi Author Award, and three Florida Book Awards bronze medals. She is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches fiction and nonfiction writing.

Check out her website, enewsletter, facebook author page, and twitter.

Winner of the 2018 Sisters in Crime (SinC) Academic Research Grant

About this edition

• Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1590580796
• ISBN 13: 9781590580790
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 492