Helpful Score: 1
"Men come and go. They go to war and die. They get diseases and die. They meet other women and leave, then you wish they would die. But home is forever. And we'll always have Joyeuse." These are the words of the slave girl and great great grandmother of Faye, the last servivor and owner of Joyeuse, a southern mansion on an island off of the gulf coast in the panhandle of Florida. Faye, a strugling arciologist, is fighting to save her ancestrial home. Then bodies start to turn up on her Island and the mystery begins. I really enjoyed the story and liked the characters.
Helpful Score: 1
There is something about this story and author I cannot forget, so I've added the book to my wish list again. The story is haunting and interesting. I can't remember another book that I've wanted to "get back" and keep.
Very exciting story line, edge of your seat. Historically interesting. All around entertaining book.
Very interesting read. The story is about a "pot-hunter", Faye Longchamps, who is trying to save her ancestral home on an island off the Florida panhandle. There's also a couple of murder mysteries. A couple of archaelogy students were murdered on the island, and Faye also discovers the bones of a missing heiress who had been murdered fourth years before. Lots of history of the Florida Panhandle in the mix as well.
This book gives a good chunk of history about Florida, hurricanes, archeology and the era right before the Civil War. Very enjoyable. The mystery twists right at the end. Looking forward to the other two books in the 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 lose 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...
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 lose 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...
