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Larabeth McLeod has a doctorate, beauty, several patents, a successful environmental firm...and a secret. When a faceless voice on the phone threatens her life, she is paralyzed with fear. But when the man calling himself "Babykiller" threatens the child she gave up for adoption twenty-five years before, she knows she must act before he destroys her secret daughter and triggers nuclear disaster in the process.
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About STRANGERS, sixth in the Faye Longchamp mystery series--Faye Longchamp and Joe Wolf Mantooth have, on the strength of Faye's newly minted Ph.D., founded an archaeological consulting firm...just in time for the economy to tank. But neither of them is known for throwing up their hands and giving up, so they've landed their first big project at a historic home in St. Augustine, Florida. America's oldest city is the perfect place for archaeologists to dig up the past, but four centuries is long enough for the city to have accumulated some skeletons that should probably stay buried and some ghosts that can't be exorcised. Within a day of their arrival, a lovely young woman has disappeared, leaving behind a smear of blood, a collection of priceless artifacts, and a note asking for Faye's help. Within two days, the missing woman's boyfriend is found floating in the Matanzas River, his throat slashed. The detective in charge of the case, who believes that the artifacts are a key to solving the crime, hires Faye as a consultant to track down their origin.
The artifacts Faye and Joe excavate at their work site make no historical sense. They date from every era of St. Augustine history, from the Native Americans to the conquistadors to the Gilded Age robber barons to the Roaring Twenties elite. Casting a pall over the work is the discovery of a buried cache of children's toys from the 1920s, which hits eight-months-pregnant Faye particularly hard. And Dunkirk Manor, the mansion they are investigating, is haunted in a way that science-minded Faye can't explain. Perhaps it is haunted by the ghost of its current owners' dead child. Perhaps the spirit of a starlet murdered while filming a silent movie nearby still waits, longing for her married lover. Perhaps the soul of Allyce Dunkirk, the lady of the house during the Jazz Age, is bound to this house that she poured her heart into making uniquely beautiful, because it was the only outlet for her art that society could approve. Or perhaps there are no ghosts here, only the remnants of pain so deep that death can't wipe it away.
In the house's attic, the most stunning artifact is uncovered: the diary of a priest who left Spain in 1565 and was present at the founding of St. Augustine. Father Domingo describes how he watched the conquistadors as they murdered both the Europeans they branded infidels and the Native Americans they called heathen, until he reached his breaking point, walking away from his countrymen and seeking refuge with the so-called heathen. His tragic description of first contact between Europe and the Americas drives Faye to spend late nights translating the manuscript, and the stresses of running her business, helping the police, worrying over the lost woman, arguing with Joe, and working with Father Domingo's diary may be more than a very pregnant woman can bear.
But the ghosts of the Ancient City are demanding masters, and Faye is driven to uncover their secrets--until it becomes clear that what they seek is Faye herself. And her child...
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About Floodgates, fifth in the Faye Longchamp mystery series--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 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, Shelly Broussard, like winds around the still, quiet eye of a hurricane. Does Shelly's heroic rescue work in the aftermath of Katrina hold 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?
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About Findings, fourth in the Faye Longchamp mystery series--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.
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About Effigies, third in the Faye Longchamp mystery series--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.
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About Relics, second in the Faye Longchamp mystery series--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.
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About Artifacts, first in the Faye Longchamp mystery series--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.
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"A Singularly Unsuitable Word" features a child, hiding in the weeds as her sister is kidnapped. "Mouse House" stars a security chief, unsure whether his job will rob him of the love of his life. "Starch" features a nurse, holding the lives of a young woman and her daughter in her two hands. Step into the shoes of three people at their lives' biggest turning points, and see how you would react.
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The surgeon has his scalpel in hand. Nurses and doctors hover around the unconscious patient. Life and death hang in the balance, and Nurse Crain is watching. She knows something that only one other person in this locked room can know...a dead man lies in the equipment closet. One of the people wielding scalpel and forceps killed him. Nurse Crain is not the kind of woman to let murderers go free.
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Imagine you're the security chief at the world's largest theme park. Imagine that a mafioso succumbs to rat poison sprinkled on his breakfast apple strudel. Imagine that Peter Pan plummets to his death from a castle tower by lunch. If you fail to find the killer, company stock will be in freefall by dinner. Where can you turn for help? Fortunately, the sweet old hag in the basement sees all...
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Bootleggers. Prohibition. The primeval Florida swamp. And eight-year-old Lila cowering on the riverbank as a drunken man hauls her teen-aged sister Iris away at gunpoint. If Iris fades away into the night with Jeb Gibson, Lila will never see her sister again. Gibson has every reason to think that he can get away with murder and more. But Gibson doesn't know little Lila...
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