Faye Longchamp

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 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 on to 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, 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 year's taxes, and 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 cheek bone. Faye is torn. If she reports her find, 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 herself, unaware that the past is rushing toward her like a hurricane across deceptively calm Gulf waters.

Faye Longchamp, back in school to pursue her archaeological aspirations, has landed a job as chief archaeologist for a rural development project, so she heads to the hills of Alabama with Joe, her Cherokee assistant. She's looking forward to a legitimate dig and hopes to uncover the mystery of the Sujosa, an ethnic group of mysterious origin. The Sujosa have lived in Alabama's most remote hills for centuries and have shown an impressive immunity to many diseases, including AIDS. Late one night, Faye awakens to find the house in flames. She saves herself and one of her housemates, but her friend Carmen, the project historian, never had a chance. The suspicious death leads Faye to a different sort of investigation. Then within days, a teenage boy jumps from a cell phone tower that, when completed, will connect the Sujosa with the outside world. Now Faye must use her professional and personal skills to identify the killer and discover the long-buried secret of the Sujosa as well.

Archaeologist Faye Longchamp and her friend 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 farmer Carroll Calhoun refuses their request to investigate a nearby mound on his land, 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. Soon the 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. But 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? Or, since local farmers have been plowing up stone tools like the murder weapon for centuries, did one of them 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 and that their combined knowledge of stone tools is impressive. They had motive, means, and opportunity-but so does almost everyone in Neshoba County.

Faye Longchamp is overjoyed to be paid to do archaeological work she would have done anyway-excavating a site that was once her family's. That joy ends abruptly when intruders break into a dear friend's house and leave him dead among the scattered remains of Faye's artifacts. 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 the open wall safe is untouched, and choice artifacts are left in their cases. The only thing missing is Faye's field notes. Faye seeks out the story behind the mysterious emerald. How was her fieldwork connected to her friend's death? The key to all her questions must be buried in the field notes now held by the killers. Now, it is only a matter of time before they come for Faye.

In New Orleans, the intersection between the past and the present is all too often deadly. Archaeologist Faye Longchamp and her excavating team are horrified when a corpse surfaces that's far too new to be an archaeological find. Faye and her fiancé, 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. Is Shelly's heroic rescue work in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the key to her death? Or does the sheaf of photos in her work files hold the answer?

Faye Longchamp and Joe Wolf Mantooth have, on the strength of Faye's newly minted PhD, founded an archaeological consulting firm-just in time for the economy to tank. But neither of them is known for throwing in the towel, 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. 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.

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, but a poverty-stricken life on a houseboat with an eccentric grandmother doesn't seem like a good way for Amande to get the education she deserves. Then when the girl's grandmother and her no-account uncle are murdered, her prospects worsen. With only two known relatives, neither of whom is 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 habitable. Pirate-era silver coins are found and disappear. Shadowing it all is the fact that the murderer is still 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.

Archaeologist Faye Longchamp-Mantooth has dug herself a deep hole, and she can't make her way out of it. As she struggles to recover from a shattering personal loss, she sees that everyone she loves is trying to reach out to her. If only she could reach back. Instead she's out digging holes all over her home, the Florida island of Joyeuse. In their old plantation home, Joe Wolf Mantooth is surrounded by family-Faye, the wife he loves; their toddler son he adores; and his father, who hasn't gotten around to telling Joe how long he's been out of prison or how he got there-yet Joe has never felt so helpless or alone. Then a close friend at the local marina is brutally murdered, the first in a string of crimes against women that rocks Micco County. Joe, desperate to help Faye, realizes she is in danger from both her inner demons and someone who has breached the island's isolation. Local law and environmental officials say they want to help, but to Faye and Joe they feel more like invaders. A struggling Faye reaches back over a century into her family's history for clues. And all the while, danger snakes further into their lives, threatening the people they love, their cherished home, even the very ground-some of it poisoned-beneath their feet.

Faye Longchamp-Mantooth, who runs a small archaeological consulting firm, is in Oklahoma so she and Joe can join his father, Sly Mantooth, in dispersing his mother's ashes. While there, Faye is serving as archeology consultant on the reopening of a site closed down decades before when an archaeologist disappeared. The Muscogee Creek Nation intends to create a park, if nothing sacred lies in the soil. But the bones that emerge as the backhoe does it work prove to be those of Dr. Sophia Townsend, killed by a blow to the head. Now tribal police hire Faye to investigate. In so doing, Faye learns that Sly Mantooth knows more about the dead woman than he has admitted. Sophia Townsend had possessed a forceful sexual magnetism that she didn't hesitate to use to manipulate everyone around her, breaking hearts and destroying marriages. Was she killed by a lover, a wife, or Sly Mantooth? Or was it due to greed or fame? Faye's obsession with this case tests her professional ethics as well as her marriage. Such was the power of Sophia Townsend that, twenty-nine years after her murder, she wreaks havoc once again.

In Undercurrents, the eleventh Faye Longchamp Mystery, Faye has traveled to Memphis, a city steeped in music, poverty, history, and the smoky tang of barbecue. She's there working alone to do an assessment of a site, welcome work for her small archaeological consulting firm.When Faye spies a child too young to be wandering along a creek alone, she follows the girl. A day later she uncovers a dying woman, buried alive near a spot where Kali might well be hiding. Nobody would blame Faye for running hard, but she can't make herself leave Kali, the woman's now orphaned daughter, who might be in danger. She's not welcomed by the people in Kali's struggling community, nor by the police working the crime. Yet she stays, for Kali, and for the bereaved who need her to communicate their fears to a police department that they trust even less than they trust Faye.When they confide rumors of other women beaten to death by a man so obsessed with burial that he places fresh flowers in their cold hands, Faye begs the police to widen the investigation to seek a serial killer. They refuse. Faye's gut is telling her that a monster is stalking Memphis, endangering the child she has come to love. If the police can't catch him, then she will have no choice but to try to find him herself.

What secrets lie deep beneath the surface? A deafening explosion rocks a historic Oklahoma City hotel, sending archaeologist Faye Longchamp-Mantooth crashing to the marble floor of the lobby. She's unhurt but shaken—after all, any time something blows up in Oklahoma City, the first word on everyone's lips is the same: bomb. Faye is in town for a conference celebrating indigenous arts but is soon distracted by the aftermath of the explosion, which cracks open the old hotel's floor to reveal subterranean chambers that had housed Chinese immigrants a century before. Faye is fascinated by the tunnels, which are a time capsule back to the early twentieth century—but when the bodies of three children are discovered deep beneath the city, her sense of discovery turns to one of dread.

When tragedy strikes and everything she loves is threatened, Faye Longchamp will resort to desperate measures. Because some losses cut to the bone... The suspicious drowning death of Captain Edward Eubank breaks archaeologist Faye Longchamp's heart. It also confuses her, because he was found in scuba gear and she's never heard him even mention scuba diving. During their last conversation he told her that he believed he'd found a storied shipwreck, but when Faye checks it out she finds nothing there-not a plank, not a single gold coin, nothing. If there's no treasure, then why is her friend dead? But the situation quickly escalates beyond a murder mystery. Surrounded by a community struggling in the aftermath of a major hurricane that has changed the very landscape, Faye grapples not only with the loss of her friend, but with her fears for her daughter, who is being romanced by a man who may be very dangerous. As a professional with her own consulting firm, Faye had long ago given up her "anything goes" attitude when the law stood between her and an interesting dig. Now that recklessness is back, and there's nothing she won't do to protect her daughter.

Faye Longchamp doesn't believe in ghosts. But she's an archaeologist-dead people are her life. While working in Rosebower, a rural New York town founded by spiritualists, Faye is surrounded by people who talk to the dead on a regular basis. When the most influential spiritualist in town, Tilda Armistead, invites Faye and her project assistant to commune with the dead, she can't say no. An hour later, her crystal ball shows Faye things no rational mind can explain. Tilda is dead. The evidence says that someone trapped Tilda in a small room, nailing its one door shut before setting her Victorian home on fire. There is no possible way for Tilda to have escaped the blaze, let alone drive for miles before finding Faye and dying in her arms. Yet Tilda did. How? And why? In this bizarre community, Faye finds herself surrounded by people who had reason to kill Tilda-her estranged daughter who may be the heir to the Armistead fortune; the daughter's husband, a stage magician with a long history of making things vanish; a rich developer with dreams of a ghostly Disneyland project in Rosebower, a project which Tilda fought with her considerable political clout; and the town's holistic doctor whose mysterious herbal potions are consumed by customers far and wide. As Faye watches the psychics and charlatans jockey for power, and sends a cry for help to her shrewd husband Joe, Tilda's sister, Myrna, is slowly dying. Will Rosebower reveal its secrets to Faye before more goes up in flames?