Faye Longchamp Mystery series - Mary Anna Evans

Mary Anna Evans is a chemical engineer by training and license, with a degree in engineering physics thrown in for spice, but she loves reading about history and writing about an archaeologist. Truth be told, she says she's a little jealous of Faye and her archaeological adventures.

She enjoys reading, writing, gardening, spending time with her family, cooking, and playing her 7-and-a-half-foot-long monster of a grand piano. Her cat helps her write, so she says she should probably put his name on her books.

1. Artifacts (2003)
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 40-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. Because the killer is still close at hand, ready to kill again to keep secrets dead and buried.

2. Relics (2005)
Erstwhile artifacts blackmarketeer Faye Longchamp lands the job as chief archaeologist for a rural development project and heads to the hills of Alabama, her studly Cherokee assistant, Joe, in tow. She's looking forward to a legitimate dig and hopes to uncover the mystery of the Sujosa, an ethnic group of mysterious origins known for their aquamarine eyes and unusual resistance to disease.

But the murder of one of the project team leads to a different sort of investigation, and Faye finds herself using her professional and personal skills to discover the murderer and the long-buried secret of the Sujosa as well.

3. Effigies (2007)
Archaeologist Faye Longchamp and her friend, Joe Wolf Mantooth, have traveled to Neshoba County, Mississippi, to help excavate a site near Nanih Waiya, the sacred mound where tradition says the Choctaw nation was born.

When farmer Carroll Calhoun refuses their request to investigate an ancient Native American mound, Faye and her colleagues are disappointed, but his next action breaks their hearts: he tries to bulldoze the huge relic to the ground. Faye and Joe rush to protect history—with their bodies, if necessary.

The situation grows more dangerous as Choctaws arrive to defend the mound and the farmer’s white and black neighbors come to defend his property rights. That night, Calhoun is found dead. Was he killed by an archaeologist? Did a Choctaw take up arms to defend an embattled heritage? Did someone decide to even the score with an old rival?

The sheriff is well-aware that Faye and Joe were near the spot where Calhoun’s body was found. The whole county saw their confrontation with him over the mound. They had motive, means, and opportunity—but so did almost everyone in Neshoba County.

4. Findings (2008)
Faye Longchamp is overjoyed to be paid to do archaeological work she would have done anyway excavating a site that was once her family's. That joy ends abruptly when intruders break into a dear friend's house and leave him dead among the scattered remains of Faye's artifacts. But the open wall safe is untouched, and choice artifacts are left in their cases.

There seems to be no motive at all for the vicious crime unless the thieves were aware of the fabulous emerald he had been holding minutes before his death. But Faye had only uncovered it that very evening, and she had told no one.

When his widow asks Faye to organize the relics left broken on the floor, Faye realizes that something is actually missing, not an emerald nor a valuable painting, but her field notes. How was her fieldwork connected to her friend's death? The key to all her questions must be buried in the field notes now held by the killers. Now it is only a matter of time before they come for Faye.

5. Floodgates (2008)
In New Orleans, archaeologist Faye Longchamp and her team of archaeologists are horrified when a corpse surfaces that's far too new to be an archaeological find. Faye and 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, Shelly Broussard, like winds around the still, quiet eye of a hurricane. Does Shelly's heroic rescue work in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the key to her death? Or does the sheaf of photos in her work files hold the answer?

6. Strangers (2010)
Faye Longchamp’s new archaeological firm has landed a project in St. Augustine, Florida. In four centuries, America’s oldest city has accumulated skeletons that should probably stay buried.

Within a day of Faye’s arrival, a woman disappears, leaving behind blood, priceless artifacts, and a note asking for Faye's help. A detective hires Faye to find the artifacts’ origin. But the ghosts of the Ancient City are demanding masters, and Faye is also driven to uncover their secrets—until it becomes clear that what they seek is Faye herself.

7. Plunder (2012)
Time is not on Faye Longchamp’s side. She and 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.

A young girl is drawn to Faye, perhaps because she idolizes the confident archaeologist. Young Amande is bright and curious, but has apoverty-stricken life on a houseboat with an eccentric grandmother. When the girl’s grandmother and her no-account uncle are murdered, her prospects worsen. 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. And then 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.

8. Rituals (2013)
Archeologist Faye and her 17-year-old adopted daughter, Amande, have a job to do in Rosebower, N.Y., a town with a history full of Spiritualists, religious reformers, and radical feminists. Not long after they've begun their work separating decades of donated junk at the local museum, Faye and Amande have a murder mystery on their hands.

Medium Tilda Armistead is the victim of arson, dying of smoke inhalation after escaping a fire set at her home, but in addition to the obvious question of whodunit, Faye must resolve the related one of why a dying agoraphobic who had traveled only a couple thousand miles since 1972 had driven thirty miles to ask a relative stranger for help. And what's a retired magician, known for debunking others' tricks, doing in town?