Review: Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery (Faye Longchamp Mysteries) by Mary Anna Evans

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press (March 6, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590589319
• ISBN-13: 978-1590589311

Book Description


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...

About the Author

 

Mary Anna Evans has degrees in physics and engineering, but her heart is in the past. Her series character, Faye Longchamp, lives the exciting life of an archaeologist, and Mary Anna envies her a little. Mary Anna's award-winning series of Faye's adventures includes Artifacts, Relics, Effigies, Findings, Floodgates, Strangers and, new in 2012, Plunder.


My Review

This is the seventh book in the Faye Longchamp series.  I have only read the first book in the series and if I had more time on my hands would have loved to have read the five between first. In actuality this book, Plunder, can be a stand alone novel but the writing style is so good that you want to read them all!

Faye is an archaeologist first and foremost.  Archaeologists are somewhat like detectives as they are following clues, examining, detecting,concluding....thus Faye is a very plausible detective.  In this latest adventure, Faye has been hired to catalogue in situ artifacts at the mouth of the Mississippi River as an oil slick approaches.  Very much a story taken straight from the headlines.

Faye along with her husband Joe and baby son and new character teenager Amande are involved with very realistic characters and situations.  Your heart will be tugged at the situation Amande has been placed in. This is a great book in a great series...it's available in March...you'll have time to catch up with some of the earlier books in the series before it's out!