WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT ARTIFACTS

Publishers Weekly—“Few corners of Florida remain unmined for crime fiction and now, happily, there’s one less. 

The shifting little isles along the Florida Panhandle—hurricane-wracked bits of land filled with plenty of human

history—serve as the effective backdrop for Evans’s debut, a tale of greed, archaeology, romance and murder….

Readers should welcome this strong new heroine.”

 
Booklist—“First-novelist Evans introduces a strong female sleuth in this extremely promising debut, and she
makes excellent use of her archaeological subject matter, weaving past and present together in a multilayered,
compelling plot.  Let’s hope Faye Longchamp’s home-restoration project is one of those remodeling jobs that
never ends.” (Barbara Bibel)

Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center, University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse:  I’ve mentioned previously that one of life’s true delights for me is the discovery of a new author and his or her first novel that I find truly exciting. Mary Anna Evans and her Artifacts are that author and that first novel!

Faye Longchamp is the heroine of this atmospheric gothic mystery set in the panhandle of Florida and its tiny islands and islets of shifting sand. She is a shadowy figure in many ways—a young, attractive biracial woman who clings stubbornly to her heritage, both cultural and built, as she lives in a purposely run-down ancestral plantation mansion. She literally hides the existence of Joyeuse, the name given to the property in ante-bellum times, from the taxman, while she works as a supervisor on a university archaeological dig by day and a pothunter by night to save up enough money to meet property tax demands. Pothunting may be anathema to all of us who embrace the concepts of scientific excavation methods, provenience, site reports, etc., but Author Evans very skillfully and sympathetically explains Faye’s rationalizing—indeed, Faye’s need to carry on this illegal activity. The descendant of a remarkable slave named Cally, who was freed before the Civil War, Faye lives in a shadow world between races, classes and the law-abiding and the lawless. Fay is, in a Faulknerian sense, one of "the unvanquished."

In the midst of her legitimate excavating and her trafficking in illicit artifacts, Faye is plunged into the forty-year-old mystery of the disappearance of a young local debutante when skeletal remains are discovered on the dig. Almost within hours two student excavators are assassinated, followed by the discovery of three more decades-old bodies. Seagreen Island has become more than just an archaeology site—it has become a veritable killing field. Her life, plus that of her mysterious friend Joe Wolf Mantooth, is in danger and it eventually becomes evident to Faye that the killer of four decades past is alive and well and more than willing to continue killing.

This novel is wonderfully multi-layered, spinning a wonderful murder mystery while at the same time lovingly describing a place (the west Florida panhandle) that retains much of its unique history and culture. With seamless ease, Ms. Evans tells the back story of how Faye’s great-great-grandmother Cally, a freed slave, could become the owner of Joyeuse, and hand it down to her present day descendant.

This is simply a wonderful book and I look forward to the continuing of Faye’s adventures in next summer’s publication of Relics.  (William R. Gresens)

 

Crescent Blues—"Any author whose name so closely resembles the real name of George Eliot clearly has a lot

to live up to…Artifacts is an extremely charming novel, and its central character—the mixed-ancestry Faye

pluckily striving to survive despite the leviathan of the state and the scheming of a murderer—proves enormously

appealing….The tale grips from beginning to end….Read this book.  You’ll enjoy it.”  (John Grant)

 
South Florida Sun-Sentinel—“In her debut, Artifacts, Mary Anna Evans delivers an affecting atmospheric mystery
filled with unusual and engaging characters.”  (Oline Cogdill)

 

"Artifacts is a haunting, atmospheric story in which a mysterious island holds the clue to long-buried family secrets.  Mary Anna Evans brings passion and insight to her subject and has written a modern southern gothic novel about a biracial woman's search for her heritage."
--PJ Parrish, Edgar nominee and New York Times best-selling author of Thicker than Water

 "A fresh contemporary protagonist for the new millennium, Faye Longchamp gives the phrase ‘scraping to get by’ a whole different meaning.  An accidental discovery threatens to engulf Faye in a level of violence equal to the hurricanes that plague the Florida Panhandle.  Past and present merge in an intriguing story ably demonstrating that Miami doesn't have a monopoly on murder in Florida."
 --Aileen Schumacher, author of Rosewood's Ashes, Book four in the award-winning Tory Travers mystery series

Florida Journal—“Richly atmospheric, populated with a colorful cast, and steeped in the local landscape and history of the Gulf Coast region, Artifacts makes a gripping read with a surprising plot twist.” (Simone Behr)

The Islander (Anna Maria Island, FL)—“Artifacts is an adventurous blend of mystery, history and social commentary and, without doubt, one of the most unusual and intriguing Florida novels published in years.” (Paul Berman and Paul Roat)

Midwest Book Review Online—“A compelling read that holds the reader's attention throughout.” (Christy Tillery French)

Heartland Review—“Set along the Florida gulf coast, Artifacts is a fast-paced mystery, full of fascinating details about archaeology and life in coastal Florida. Ms. Evans has created a book full of unique characters. We give it five hearts.” (Judy Schuler)

Orlando Sentinel (reprinted in Pioneer Press, Minneapolis-St. Paul)—“Evans…stuffs her novel with history, atmosphere and action, plus racism, environmentalism and some good old-fashioned Florida politics.  Oh, and archaeology, of course.” (Nancy Pate)

The Oak Ridger (Oak Ridge, Tennessee)—“…an intriguing mystery debut…”

Cozies, Crimes, And Capers—Mary Anna Evans creates a wonderful female character for us in Faye Longchamp, surrounds her with a variety of males who make her life interesting and difficult, and places them all in the tropical setting of West Florida….This book is an excellent read.  I couldn’t put it down.” (Lonnie Cruse)

Aglaia—“…a tantalizing mystery.”

I Love A Mystery—“Mary Anna Evans tells a good story.” (Mary Ann Steele)

Kirkus Review—“A capably written debut…”

The Post and Courier, Charleston, SC-- "Mary Anna Evans' first novel, a nifty mystery, skillfully combines a number of elements... The multilayered puzzles make for interesting reading."  (Janice Shumake)

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Writer interested in 'lot of things' parlays curiosity into mystery novel
 

By GREG LANGLEY, Books Editor, The Advocate

Take a decaying old plantation house on a Florida barrier island, throw in a multiracial anthropology student who is trying to save the old mansion, a taciturn Native American man, some fresh dead bodies, some not-so-fresh dead bodies, some illegal pot hunters, a suspicious sheriff and a hell of a villain, add a hurricane and you come up with Artifacts (Poison Pen Press, $24.95).

Florida resident and Mississippi native Mary Anna Evans wrote Artifacts, and she is almost as much a mystery as the plot of her book. Evans grew up in Lamar County, Miss., just outside Hattiesburg, and she was a beauty queen, serving as Lamar County's Junior Miss. Typical empty headed-pageant winner, you say? Try this on for size: Evans went on to get her undergraduate degree in engineering physics (Murray State University) and a graduate degree in chemical engineering (Ole Miss).

"I just tend to be interested in a lot of things," Evans said in a phone interview. One of those things is archaeology. Another is writing. She kinda backed into that last one.

"I went off to graduate school," Evans said, "I audited a writing class to exercise that part of my brain." That was some 20 years ago. Evans has been writing ever since. Artifacts is not her first book, but it's the first one she's published. Her first book was a romance, and it got a cool reception, so she wanted to stay away from anything that sounded like romance. She'd always been interested in Southern mansions, keeping coffee table books on the subject lying around to peruse. That gave her an idea.

"The idea came to me first, and it was a mystery: how a passion for a Southern antebellum house leads an anthropologist to become a law breaker (by digging artifacts up illegally and selling them on the black market)."

"I had read about the Last Isle disaster," Evans said. The 1856 destruction of a resort hotel during a hurricane on the Louisiana barrier island played a part in the plot that rapidly developed in Evans' mind.

"I wanted there to be a house there that had all these interesting things about it," she said. So she invented Joyeuse, a house that sits on Joyeuse Island on the coast of western Florida. "I developed this character that inherits the house but not the money to take care of it," Evans said. The character was Faye Longchamp, the archaeology student who has to dig illegally for artifacts to sell. Faye is a pot hunter. She has to dig, and when she digs, she finds bodies, some dead a long time and some just recently deceased.

"Once a pot hunter defiled an ancient site, archaeologists could only hope to salvage a fraction of the information it had once held," Faye observes in the opening chapter. She is torn by guilt over her own violation of the professional ethics she believes in. Faye is a complex character, descendant of black, white and Native American ancestors, she is racially as ambiguous as she is morally.

Evans wanted Faye to be of mixed race because that reflected the house's ownership. "I wanted to write about the house and what its story would be," she said. "It (Faye's race) would be a way to acknowledge that it was built by slaves."

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Too-recent skull sets off mystery on Florida island

BY SUSAN L. RIFE, Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Mary Anna Evans' master's thesis was titled "A Modeling Study of the NH3-NO-02 Reaction Under the Operating Conditions of Fluidized Bed Coal Combustors."

She's shifted gears rather radically for her latest work, a mystery novel set on a barrier island along the Florida Panhandle, with a biracial archaeologist as the heroine.

Evans, who holds degrees in physics and chemical engineering but now has turned to raising her family in Gainesville and writing novels, will be in Sarasota to sign copies of "Artifacts" (Poisoned Pen Press, $24.95) Saturday at Circle Books.

She's practically a Renaissance woman. In addition to her science and environmental background and education, she said she had "always enjoyed the arts in general, enjoyed music all my life and had written since I was in high school."

Even during the years she worked as an environmental consultant, writing was her primary means of expression both on and off the job.

"The only project is your report," she said of her consulting work. "You're not selling widgets, you're selling your ability to communicate."

She also has a longtime love for historic buildings and architecture, both from an engineering standpoint and from their "romantic" physical beauty.

These elements converge in "Artifacts," in which Faye Longchamp, a "mature" archaeology student, is desperate to hold onto her family's ancestral home, a crumbling plantation tucked on a Florida island. When rising taxes threaten to cost Faye her home, she begins digging for artifacts on the property and in the surrounding wildlife refuge and selling them on the black market. What she finds instead is a too-recent skull and a mystery that endangers her life.

There's a lot going on in the story -- issues of race relations in the South from the Civil War to the present day, taxation, the environment, women's roles, the ethics of archaeological digs -- but that's the way Evans likes it.

"I do tend to like to work that way. The fear would be that there would be too much for the readers," she said in a telephone interview. "To me, keeping all the balls in the air is part of the interest of it. You think you've got a handle on what's going on and then this other thing pops up. The trick is whether you've made the leap logical to the reader."

Evans originally set out to explore the larger topic embodied by Faye Longchamp, whose biracial makeup puts her with an uneasy foot on both sides of the issues implicated by the crumbling plantation.

"You really need to acknowledge that those homes were built by slaves," said Evans. "I like to tackle larger issues, so I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if the person who inherited that home had heritage from both sides of the problem. How would she feel about herself, how would she feel about the house?"

She set the novel in Florida's Last Isles because she's "always thought that was an especially beautiful place. Up until quite recently it's been pretty remote for a beach area. To make the plot work, I needed a place that wasn't heavily tourist-developed."

She did her first book-signing of "Artifacts" at the Tattered Pages Books and Espresso Bar in Crawfordville, near the Last Isles, which seemed like a good idea when she was planning the tour.

"Then as the time approached, I realized it only had two red lights," she said, referring to the town's tiny size. But it was "one of the nicest signings we had. It turned out very well."

 

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Faye Longchamp is an unlikely protagonist, poor,  with little formal
education.  However, she has a unique home located on a hidden old
plantation located on a small island off of Florida's northern gulf
coast.  How Faye supports herself and maintains her prized possession is a
mystery sometimes even to Faye.  But the true mystery in Artifacts has to do
with the murder of two  archeological assistants and the much earlier murder
of a young woman.  Why were the young people so brutally killed?  Who is the
mystery woman from long ago?

Learning about Florida is always interesting.  I didn't know that the
islands on our north gulf coast change when a hurricane moves across
them. Whole islands are cleared of known structures and history is made and
changed with each hurricane pass. Excavating those lost structures
yields artifacts that provide rewards both legal and illegal.

Finding a new author who is able to capture your attention, teach you
about the history of your home state, and help you follow the twists and
turns of murder is a great joy.  In her debut novel Mary Anna Evans does all of
those things, and more.--Margaret Hamilton, Murder on the Beach Newsletter
 

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Off the coast of the Florida Panhandle lay the Last Isles and on Joyeuse lies the antebellum mansion belonging to Faye Longchamp. It is badly in need of repairs but Faye barely can pay taxes and the last thing she wants is lose the home that has been in her family for generations. She earns the money to pay the taxes by illegally digging up artifacts on her land and the National Wild Refuge and selling them to collectors whom don't care about the source. Faye also works on an archeological dig on nearby Seagreen Island when two students in the group disappear. On a hunch, Faye starts digging and finds the two bodies, both shot to death. The dig is closed and Faye looks for artifacts on Water Island when she comes under attack by a man she thought was a friend and his partner who are digging up priceless Clovis artifacts. When she digs up the body of a young debutante who disappeared many years ago she comes to the attention a killer who intends to make Faye his fourth victim. Faye is biracial and doesn't feel as if there is a place for her in mainstream society, which is why she is determined to hold on too her land, the only place she believes she belongs. She doesn't realize she has two killers who want her dead before she discovers and reveals their secrets. ARTIFACTS is an exciting and colorful amateur sleuth novel that is rich in atmosphere giving the reader a picture of what it takes to live in an island culture."--Harriet Klausner, Allreaders.com