FPAN Archaeology Bookclub

We will be having “mimosas in the museum” during our meeting at the Destination Archaeology Resource Center in downtown Pensacola! This will be our first meeting on the thriller mystery book “Artifacts” by Mary Anna Evans. We’ll talk about chapters 1-10, following the Archaeology Books For Fun podcast’s part 1 of 3 on this book.

About the book:

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 M**der, she'll reveal her illegal livelihood, thus risking J*il 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. Because the killer is still close at hand, ready to K*ll again to keep his secrets dead and buried.

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Space is limited to 15 people; RSVP today to reserve your spot!

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Host or Publisher Florida Public Archaeology Network