Isolation: A Faye Longchamp Mystery
Mary Anna Evans
Poisoned Pen, Aug 4 2015, $26.95
ISBN 9781464204043
On Joyeuse Island, Florida Joe Wolf Mantooth worries about the
behavior of his archeologist wife, Faye Longchamp-Mantooth who seems very
distracted grieving over what she recently lost. Her only focus is digging holes on their
property as she neglects everything important like her health and their
business; and though he urgently tries to believe otherwise their children (two
years old Michael and seventeen years old Amande) and him. He knows their perceptive teen away at camp
will soon realize something is not right with mom.
Joe’s former convict father Sly arrives at his son’s Gulf Coast
home. Soon after that Micco County Sheriff
and environmental inspector Gerry Steinberg arrives with a team looking into a
poisonous leak that poses a health threat.
Genealogist Delia Scarsdale, accompanied by Oscar Croft, come to the
Mantooth home seeking information on the latter’s great-great-grandfather Union
soldier Elias Croft and Faye’s great-great-grandmother Cally Stanton who
allegedly held him prisoner. Meanwhile
the murder of bar and grill owner Liz Colton and assaults on other women
frighten the residents.
The fantastic ninth Faye Longchamp mystery (see Rituals, Strangers and Plunder) captures
series fans throughout; starting with Joe’s opening lament. The environmental and murder subplots are top
rate, but it is the 1935 Federal Writers’ Project to record oral history (in
this case a fictional account of the legend of Cally Stanton) that steals the
show.
Harriet Klausner
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