Artifacts

April 7, 2003
Few corners of Florida remain unmined for crime fiction and now, happily, there's one less. The shifting little isles along the Florida Panhandle—hurricane-wracked bits of land filled with plenty of human history—serve as the effective backdrop for Evans's debut, a tale of greed, archeology, romance and murder. The latest in a long line of courageous and resourceful women, Faye Longchamp can trace her mixed ancestry back to a slave and a once magnificent plantation house, Joyeuse, which she now claims by heritage and squatter's rights and whose very existence is a closely guarded secret. Faye ekes out a living by illegal "pothunting" and acting as an assistant on a legitimate archeological dig, but her discovery of a human skull and the subsequent murder of two archeology students threaten her precarious existence. While Evans stretches credulity with the sheer number of unlikely elements that make up the plot, including a mysterious Indian and a 19th-century diary, the rich setting and the lively characters that aid or bedevil Faye in her quest more than compensate. Readers should welcome this strong new heroine.

May 1, 2003
Faye Longchamp is an archaeology student trying to hang on to her ancestral home on North Florida's Gulf Coast. When the property taxes on the dilapidated mansion--inherited from her great-great-grandmother, Cally, a freed slave--become too high, Faye decides to put her knowledge to work by digging up some artifacts to sell on the black market. What she finds, however, isn't arrowheads; it's a body, and judging by the head wound and the Jackie Kennedy-style earrings, it's been in the ground for several decades, and foul play put it there. If Faye reports her find, she will reveal her illegal activities and risk losing everything. To save herself and her home, Faye decides to learn more about the body in the ground. First-novelist Evans introduces a strong female sleuth in this extremely promising debut, and she makes excellent use of her archaeological subject matter, weaving past and present together in a multilayered, compelling plot. Let's hope Faye Longchamps' home-restoration project is one of those remodeling jobs that never ends.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)