Book 1

Artifacts

by Mary Anna Evans

Published 21 March 2004
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...

Book 2

Relics

by Mary Anna Evans

Published 1 August 2005
Faye Longchamp, back in school to pursue her dream of becoming an archaeologist, has been asked to run a project for which she is barely qualified, under the direction of a man who doesn't seem to like her much. Her assignment: to uncover the origins of a mysterious ethnic group. The Sujosa have lived in Alabama's most remote hills for centuries and have shown impressive immunity to many diseases including AIDS. Late one night, Faye awakes to find the house in flames. She saves herself and one of her housemates. But her friend Carmen, the project historian, never had a chance. Then within days, an 18 - year - old boy jumps from a cell phone tower that, when completed, would connect the outside world to the Sujosa community...

Book 3

Effigies

by Mary Anna Evans

Published 15 January 2007

2007 - Florida Book Award Bronze Medal Winner
"As an archeological tour alone the book would be worth reading, but it's the fascinating and complex characters that give the story life and vibrancy." —Rhys Bowen, New York Times bestselling author
Faye Longchamp and 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 the archaeologists' 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.
Later 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? Did a Choctaw take up arms to defend an embattled heritage? Did someone decide to even the score with an old rival?


Book 4

Findings

by Mary Anna Evans

Published 18 June 2008

Book 5

Floodgates

by Mary Anna Evans

Published 17 June 2009
Centuries of tragedy shadow New Orleans - wars, slavery, and a monumental flood that killed a thousand people and still threatens to wash all that history away. Faye Longchamp and her team of archaeologists, fighting to save New Orleans' past, are horrified when they discover a corpse that's far too new to be an archaeological find. The police presume it's just another dead body in the 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. Someone brought Shelly Broussard to this flooded - out house and left her dead body behind. Presumably, that someone was her killer. Faye and her assistant 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 like winds around the still, quiet eye of a hurricane. Is 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?

Book 8

Rituals

by Mary Anna Evans

Published 1 November 2013

Book 10

Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

Published 7 March 2017
A woman waits under five feet of dirt-a woman who is by now nothing but bones stained the deep red of Oklahoma clay. A delicate silver necklace, a handful of ancient pearls, and a priceless figurine rest with her. Twenty-nine years is a long time to wait for a proper burial. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth, who runs a small and shakily financed archaeological consulting firm with her husband, Joe, has come to Sylacauga so she and Joe can join his father, Sly Mantooth, in dispersing his mother's ashes. Fifteen years is a long time to wait for a proper ceremony. Faye has partially financed the trip by hiring on to consult on the reopening of a site closed down 29 years ago when archaeologist Dr. Sophia Townsend disappeared-for good. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation intends to create a park if nothing sacred lies in the soil. What no one expects is the lonely red bones that emerge as the backhoe completes its work. Inevitably they prove to be those of Sophia Townsend. And examination shows Sophia was first killed by a blow to the head. Chief Roy Cloud of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation's Lighthorse Tribal Police hires Faye, who clearly can't be a suspect, to consult.
Which is fine with Faye, who won't rest easy until Sophia's murder is solved. But the investigation comes uncomfortably close to home when she learns that her father-in-law knows more about the dead woman than he is willing to admit. So, it appears, does everyone in tiny Sylacauga. Dr. Sophia Townsend had possessed a sexual magnetism as forceful as an Oklahoma tornado, and she had never hesitated to use it to manipulate everyone around her, people whose hearts she broke and whose marriages she destroyed. Was she killed by one of her lovers, or by one of their wives Or by the woman who became enthralled with her Or maybe Sly Mantooth Or was something else elemental-greed, buried treasure, fame-at work Faye's obsession with this case tests her professional ethics and it tests her marriage. Such was the power of Sophia Townsend that, twenty-nine years after her murder, she wreaks havoc (along with the weather) once again.

Book 11

Undercurrents

by Mary Anna Evans

Published 3 April 2018
In Undercurrents, the eleventh Faye Longchamp Mystery, Faye has traveled to Memphis, a city steeped in music, poverty, history, and the smoky tang of barbecue. She's there working alone to do an assessment of a site, welcome work for her small archaeological consulting firm. When Faye spies a child too young to be wandering along a creek alone, she follows the girl. A day later she uncovers a dying woman, buried alive near a spot where Kali might well be hiding. Nobody would blame Faye for running hard, but she can't make herself leave Kali, the woman's now orphaned daughter, who might be in danger. She's not welcomed by the people in Kali's struggling community, nor by the police working the crime. Yet she stays, for Kali, and for the bereaved who need her to communicate their fears to a police department that they trust even less than they trust Faye...

Book 12

Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

Published 13 August 2019

What secrets lie deep beneath the surface?
A deafening explosion rocks a historic Oklahoma City hotel, sending archaeologist Faye Longchamp-Mantooth crashing to the marble floor of the lobby. She's unhurt but shaken—after all, any time something blows up in Oklahoma City, the first word on everyone's lips is the same: bomb.
Faye is in town for a conference celebrating indigenous arts, but is soon distracted by the aftermath of the explosion, which cracks open the old hotel's floor to reveal subterranean chambers that had housed Chinese immigrants a century before. Faye is fascinated by the tunnels, which are a time capsule back to the early 20th century—but when the bodies of three children are discovered deep beneath the city, her sense of discovery turns to one of dread…


Plunder

by Mary Anna Evans

Published 29 February 2012
Time is not on Faye Longchamp's side. She and her husband 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. It isn't helping that an injured babysitter has left Faye to work with a toddler underfoot. An adolescent girl is drawn to Faye, perhaps because she idolizes the confident archaeologist. Young Amande is bright and curious, and a poverty-stricken life on a houseboat with an eccentric grandmother doesn't look like a good to get the education Amande deserves. When the girl's grandmother and her no-account uncle are murdered, her prospects worsen. With only two known relatives-neither of them much more respectable than the dead uncle-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. Shadowing it all is the fact that 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...


Strangers

by Mary Anna Evans

Published 27 May 2010
While arranging a historic preservation project at a St. Augustine bed - and - breakfast, Faye Longchamp and her husband Joe Wolf Mantooth investigate the murder of an employee's abusive boyfriend. Strangers is the sixth in Evans' series of Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries.

Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

Published 4 August 2015