MARY ANNA EVANS —

   Relics. Poisoned Pen Press; trade paperback, Feb 2007 trade paperback; hardcover edition, August 2005.

   Effigies. Poisoned Pen Press, hardcover, January 2007.

   These two novels, the second and third in a series, feature Faye Longchamp, an archaeological graduate student. In Relics, she’s directing a project on an ethnically isolated Alabama group, the Sujosa, who have shown an unusual resistance to diseases that include AIDs, while in Effigies, she’s part of a team excavating a site in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where the Choctaw nation is thought to have been born. When mysterious deaths occur in each case, it’s left to Faye to investigate.

   Evans’ style is a bit heavy at times, with the scientific data weighing somewhat heavily on the narrative, but Faye is talented and possessed of a strongly independent mind that, coupled with a natural empathy for the native cultures she is investigating, make her a most sympathetic protagonist. The interaction with other members of the team and with the local population are thorny in both novels, and I found these both emotionally and intellectually satisfying.

[COMMENT] There is one earlier book in the series, as Walter mentions: Artifacts (2003); and one more recent one: Findings (2008).    — Steve