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About Findings--Faye Longchamp is overjoyed to be back home, being paid to do archaeological work she would have done anyway--excavating a site once owned by her own family.   That joy ends abruptly when intruders break into a dear friend’s palatial house and leave him dead among the scattered remains of Faye’s artifacts.  None of the valuable artworks lining the walls of his home are taken.  The open wall safe is untouched.  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 how could they have known?  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 by the intruders, Faye realizes that there actually is something missing—not an emerald nor a valuable painting, but simply her own field notes. Faye’s professional curiosity leads her to seek the story behind the mysterious emerald, and her grief drives her to find out how her fieldwork was connected to her friend’s death.  As she delves into these secrets, she comes to realize that the key to all her questions must be buried in the field notes now held by the killers…and those notes are written in her handwriting and signed with her initials on each page.  The intruders have shown that they are more than willing to kill for that information.  It is only a matter of time before they come for Faye.                                                                                      Publication date:  July 2008

          About Effigies--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 a 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.  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.  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?  Did a Choctaw take up arms to defend an embattled heritage?  Neshoba County farmers have been plowing up stone tools for centuries.  Did someone 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.  The whole county saw their confrontation with him over the mound.  And their combined knowledge of stone tools is impressive.  They had motive, means, and opportunity.  The only thing saving their skins is the fact that the same thing is true of almost everyone in Neshoba County.
About Relics--Faye Longchamp, an archaeology graduate student, is digging out of her depth. Assigned to lead her first major excavation, she arrives in a remote Alabama settlement hoping to delve into the history of a mysterious people called the Sujosa, who have lived in this valley since pre-Revolutionary times.  The Sujosa, dark-skinned people of uncertain ancestry, interest biracial Faye personally, but they interest the agency funding her work for a simple and powerful reason: they carry an inherited immunity against AIDS. When this fact is uncovered, research money begins to flow, funding geneticists and historians and linguists and archaeologists like Faye, who are tasked with finding out exactly where the Sujosa originated and where they got those genes. Suddenly, these reclusive and suspicious people, whose government has hardly managed to find the money to keep their roads paved, are besieged by bureaucrats and scientists—like Faye—and they clearly don't like it. Thrown into a project that may be beyond her skills and surrounded by people who wish she would just go away, Faye sets her mind to doing the best job she can...until a house burns down around her ears, killing one of her friends. When a teenaged boy is found dead at the base of a cell phone tower, many Sujosa blame Faye and her colleagues—intruders in their eyes—for the trouble that is besieging their community. Her archaeologist's skills at ferreting out the past may help Faye unravel the mystery of her friend's death, and they just might save her life.

About 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 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 his secrets dead and buried.