Mary Anna Evans

ARTIFACTS was an entertaining mystery. Faye Longchamp was an archaeology student until she was forced to drop out to take care of her mother and grandmother. Paying their last bills has made it impossible for her to return to school and threatens Faye's heritage. She is spending every cent she can scrape up to maintain Joyeuse - a mansion that has been passed down in her family since slave days.

She earns most of her money doing black market archaeology and selling artifacts she discovers show more mostly on her family's land. She also has a job working for a dig run by one of her university professors. But when two of the student archaeologists are found murdered and buried, the dig is halted leaving Faye in even more need of money.

When she is digging in a previously unexplored corner of land, she discovers bones. These aren't ancient. She identifies an earring that was popular in the 1960s. However, since she was digging illegally, telling anyone about the body threatens all her secrets. So she decides to investigate on her own not knowing that the murderer is still around and wants his secrets to stay buried too.

I liked the multiple timelines that were woven together in this story. Faye discovers a diary that tells the stories of some of her ancestors who also lived in Joyeuse and those stories are woven into the contemporary story. Time also flashes back to when the girl whose bones Faye discovers lived and died.

I liked the variety of characters. I liked the Florida panhandle setting. I liked the added tension that a hurricane taking aim at them brings to the story too. I also like that this is the first of what is currently a twelve-book series. show less

The protagonist, Faye, is a drop-out from a university level archaeological program. She almost makes a poverty level living with "pot hunting" while she tries to restore a decrepit family home that's pretty remote. That's the opener. She is intelligent, pretty, petite, multi-racial, strong-willed, athletic. And she has a few faults, too. (Yeah, I was all teary-eyed before I'd even finished the first chapter. She is just such a sympathetic person.) She knows full well the ethical ambiguities show more and illegality of what she's doing there, in secret, on some low sandy islands along the coast of the Florida panhandle. She even tries to be meticulous with cataloging her finds.

Meanwhile, Faye has obtained a short-term job as an archaeological field supervisor under a former professor. At her secret location on a nearby sand bar, she uncovers an old murder scene and an earring. And then two of the kids on the university dig get murdered out of the blue. Thing go quickly haywire with a lot of complications, and the suspense builds relentlessly to a stormy climax.

This is a wonderful book: way deeper than your ordinary genre novel. The author may not have set out to write the Great American Novel, but I kind of think she has nailed it. It says a lot about history, slavery, America, politics, race, archaeology, ethics, and morality. A couple of times the author even takes the reader aside to give important history lessons that contextualize what's happening.

I obtained this for free during an Amazon promotion, but after reading it I would certainly have paid full price. I'll probably move along to buy the next book in the series and find out what happens to Faye. show less

Estella (who prefers to distance herself from her past by calling herself E) was able to shake off her unhappy home in the Hudson River Valley until her much-loathed father has a fatal stroke and her mother has vanished. She takes a research job at the small college where her father was a bigwig, hoping to get a faculty position, given America is now at war and many of the college's male staff have been called up. But that's not happening, and she's doing her best with a meager salary to show more take care of herself and a long-term family housekeeper who was more of a mother to her than her distant, and now missing, mother, who she is desperate to find. Had she thrown herself off a height into the Hudson? Her body isn't found, though those of other women are.

There's a strong Gothic flavor to this mystery, as well as a complex family dynamic and elements of history that have resonance with today. While I'm not normally a fan of the Gothic, and the protagonist's speech patterns seemed more nineteenth century than mid-twentieth, I found myself caught up in the story with all its dramatic weather and creepy, tumble-down architecture. I found it imaginative and a fun departure from current mystery tropes. show less

If you like Gothics in the sense of menace and secrets and brave women who find ways to face the unthinkable, you're in for a treat with The Dark Library. In this case the setting is a bit more recent than it is in many Gothics—the novel is set in a small college town in New York just after the U.S. has entered WWII. Estella Ecker, our heroine, has a PhD in Literature from an ivy league college, but is stuck in a "research assistant" position, which means completing not only her own work, show more but that of other "real" faculty members as well. She does get to teach classes, but her rate of pay is nothing like that of her male colleagues.

Her father, who is now dead, was once a top administrator at the college. He was a difficult man, had fierce beliefs about what literature was and wasn't, and didn't suffer fools gladly (and in his world, almost everyone is considered a fool). His library of rare books is the jewel of the family home, a manor built on a cliff above the town.

Days before Estella's father died, her mother disappeared. The local police are content to assume she must have committed suicide—she was "fragile"—and aren't really interested in investigating. Estella's mother was difficult in her own way: icy, reserved, focused on her appearance and on hostessing grand dinner parties.

As the novel opens Estella meets with with the head of her division, asking for a better office. She's unsuccessful—and within a few minutes of their conversation, he throws himself off a balcony, a clearly intended suicide.

Estella is, as one might imagine, spread very thinly, still trying to understand her father's sudden death due to stroke, determined to continue hunting for her mother, and gradually coming to the realization that much of the town hated her father (but why?) and now hates her. She does, at least, have two childhood friends she's reconnected with, so she's not entirely alone.

As I said at the onset, if you like Gothic novels, you're in for a treat with The Dark Library. My summary is a bit sketchy because a great many things happen in the novel and I want to avoid spoilers, but trust me, it's a great read for a dark night or a rainy weekend.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Net Galley; the opinions are my own. show less