With a foreword by Mary Anna Evans.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 … 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…
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Good read, great characters.
Interesting setting. Learned a lot about the treasures that have been lost along the Florida coast and the people that settled there. At times the writing was awkward when in the first person, but nothing I couldn’t get past.
** spoiler alert ** I started this book years ago and gave up after a few chapters. Then my book club chose it so I gave it another try. I enjoyed the setting…it’s an area I know and love. The author mentioned Bowleg Point and Tater Island in Dixie County, Hog Town (Gainesville), and Cow Ford (Jacksonville), all places I know well.
I found the book to be somewhat preachy…that’s probably why I gave up on it the first time. Some of the characters were shameless stereotypes…Joe as the slow savage with a heart of gold was a bit hard to take, but I liked Magda, Douglass and the sheriff. Faye was a somewhat interesting character, but her prickly personality became tedious after several hundred pages. The character of Cyril wasn’t developed enough. There was no build up to his heinous act…he just beat Abigail to death because she couldn’t go out to dinner with him–no background info of unrequited love and rejection.
I like Faye Longcamp, she is strong and smart and independent.
A neat twist. I’m considering reading more, but it’s high priority. It’s good, but not great.
This book was not developed enough for my liking. It read like a sequel to ” National Treasure” To unrealistic fir me.
*Had me from the very beginning
*I truly hated for it to end
*i can’t wait to read more of her books
Although I have an interest in forensic anthropology, I could not get past the author’s biases and blatant political musings, and found that I was hoping the main character would just shut up and go away, before I finally just put it down and never picked it up again.