Artifacts
A Faye Longchamp Mystery

Faye Longchamp has lost nearly everything, except for her quick mind and a grim determination to keep her ancestral home, Joyeuse, a moldering plantation hidden along the Florida coast. No one knows how Fayes 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 on to it through Reconstruction, world wars, the Depression, and Jim Crow, but Faye has inherited the island plantationand the family tenacity. When the property taxes rise beyond her means, Faye 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 years taxes, and a big, valuable chunk of the past would save her home forever. But instead of potsherds and arrowheads, she uncovers a womans shattered skull, a Jackie Kennedystyle earring nestled against its cheek bone. Faye is torn. If she reports her find, shell reveal her illegal livelihood, thus risking jail and the loss of Joyeuse. She doesnt intend to let that happen, so she probes into the dead womans history herself, unaware that the past is rushing toward her like a hurricane across deceptively calm Gulf waters.