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EFFIGIES
By: Mary Anna Evans
Poisoned Pen Press: Scottsdale, AZ
2007 (HC)
Mary Anna Evans has maintained the high level of
quality she established in her first two Faye Longchamp novels, in this, her
third entry in the series, entitled Effigies. Once again the reader
is presented with a baffling mystery—the brutal murder of a very
unsympathetic character, a Mississippi farmer named Carroll Calhoun.
Because Calhoun had his throat cut with a flint-knapped blade, Faye and the
crew of archaeologists with whom she is working close to the murder scene
are potentially strong suspects. But then so are lots of other local
people, who found Calhoun an obnoxious neighbor.
But Mary Anna Evans gives the reader more than a
satisfying mystery—and in this case, the murderer proves to be the least
likely of suspects—as she paints with words a harsh yet loving portrait of
Neshoba County in Mississippi and its famed county fair. The fair,
described as “Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty,” is integral to the plot of
the novel, but it also serves as a vehicle to explore the complex cultural
and racial history of rural Mississippi. Evans writes with brutal honesty
of the class and race issues that remain close to the surface of Mississippi
society, but also of the complexity of those issues in the early 21st
Century. For Neshoba County is not far removed from the day when the Ku
Klux Klan was a formidable force; yet white farmers and African
American farmers come to Calhoun’s defense when his property rights seem to
be endangered by the “outsiders,” represented by Faye and the archaeology
crew working on a contract project adjacent to Calhoun’s farm. And it is
the local Choctaw community that temporarily aligns with the archaeologists
as Calhoun attempts to destroy a 3,000 year old mound on his property. But
it quickly becomes evident that the alliance is fragile at best and the
local Native Americans are no fonder of the archaeologists than are the
local farmers, who feel threatened by the archaeologists and their
sponsors. Old wounds, both emotional and physical, are re-opened when a
case of brutal racial violence from more than forty years in the past is
brought into the public spotlight.
As in the first two novels in the series, the reader is
allowed to deal with this cauldron of events and emotions through the eyes
of Faye Longhamp, a truly sympathetic protagonist in the realm of
archaeology fiction. She loves the pursuit of archaeological knowledge, but
her mixed-race heritage and her working-class background make her uniquely
able to empathize with Native Americans who viscerally mistrust the
intentions of archaeologists, to understand the misgivings of landowners who
fear government intervention in the use of their land, and to understand the
fear of “outsiders” shared by many people who are close to the land. This
continues to be the continuing strength of the Fay Longchamp series—they
encourage the reader to contemplate the effects of archaeology on those most
affected by its activities: native communities and those living in the
midst of significant archaeological districts. For that alone, we who love
archaeology owe Mary Anna Evan a very real debt of gratitude.
Four trowels for this exciting and thought-provoking
novel!
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