Book Review: Artifacts by Mary Anna Evans

Artifacts
Author: Mary Anna Evans
Series: Faye Longchamp Mysteries (Book 1)
Publication: Poisoned Pen Press; 1 edition (April 15, 2003)

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...

My Thoughts: ARTIFACTS was an entertaining mystery. Faye Longchamp was an archaeology student until she was forced to drop out to take care of her mother and grandmother. Paying their last bills has made it impossible for her to return to school and threatens Faye's heritage. She is spending every cent she can scrape up to maintain Joyeuse - a mansion that has been passed down in her family since slave days.

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.

Favorite Quote:

Hurukan is the Mayan storm god and it is fitting that his fearsome name is attached to hurricanes, the greatest storms on Earth. For all the death and havoc they wreak, it is important to remember that they are only heat engines, necessary to transfer energy from the tropics to regions that receive far less of the sun's heat. If humans didn't exist, hurricanes would simply be Nature's elegant means of taking from the energy-rich and giving to the energy-poor, wiping parts of the world down to a clean slate in the process.

I bought this one. You can buy your copy here.