Mary Anna Evans Books In Order

Artifacts

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 lose 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…

Relics

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.

Mary Anna Evans, winner of the 2004 Ben Franklin Award and the Patrick D. Smith Florida Fiction Award, started Faye’s sleuthing career in Artifacts, a novel rich in the history, archaeology, and landscape of Faye’s family and Florida’s west coast.

Effigies

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. Soon the Choctaws arrive to defend the mound and the farmer’s white and black neighbors come to defend his property rights. Though a popular young sheriff is able to defuse the situation, tempers are short.

That night, Calhoun is found dead, his throat sliced with a handmade stone blade. Was he killed by an archaeologist, angered by his wanton destruction of history? Neshoba County farmers have been plowing up stone tools like the murder weapon for centuries. Did one of them take this chance 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 and their combined knowledge of stone tools is impressive. They had motive, means, and opportunity…
. but so does almost everyone in Neshoba County.

Findings

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.
Faye seeks out the story behind the mysterious emerald. 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. Findings is the fourth book in the Faye Longchampe series.

Floodgates

Legend and romance drip from the lacy balconies of New Orleans as surely as Spanish moss drips from the branches of the city’s ancient oaks. In New Orleans, Faye Longchamp is happy just to get up in the morning and go to work. But centuries of tragedy shadow the city wars, slavery, and a monumental flood that killed a thousand people and still threatens to wash all that history away.
Faye and her team of archaeologists, fighting to save New Orleans’ past, are horrified when a corpse surfaces that’s far too new to be an archaeological find. The police presume it’s just another dead body in a long, sad sequence of dead bodies left by Hurricane Katrina, until Faye shows them a truth that only an archaeologist could see: the debris piled on top of the dead woman is all wrong. It was no flood that killed her and covered her body.
Faye knows that this is not a drowning victim whose life was snuffed out by Katrina. Someone brought the woman, dead or alive, to this flooded out house and left her dead body behind. Presumably, that someone killed her.
Faye and her fiance 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 Katrina the key to her death? Or does the sheaf of photos in her work files hold the answer? Will Faye and Joe be the next innocents engulfed in this deadly deception?

Strangers

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. The 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. And her child.