Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Floodgates
    Unavailable
    Floodgates
    Unavailable
    Floodgates
    Ebook319 pages5 hours

    Floodgates

    By Mary Anna Evans

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Centuries of tragedy shadow New Orleans—wars, slavery, and a monumental flood that killed a thousand people and still threatens to wash all that history away.
    Faye Longchamp and her team of archaeologists, fighting to save New Orleans’ past, are horrified when they discover a corpse that’s far too new to be an archaeological find. The police presume it’s just another dead body in the long, sad sequence of dead bodies left by Hurricane Katrina, until Faye shows them a truth that only an archaeologist could see: the debris piled on top of the dead woman is all wrong. Someone brought Shelly Broussard to this flooded-out house and left her dead body behind. Presumably, that someone was her killer.
    Faye and her assistant Joe Wolf Mantooth are drawn into the investigation by a detective who believes their professional expertise is critical to the case. They quickly learn that trouble swirled around the victim like winds around the still, quiet eye of a hurricane. Is Shelly’s heroic rescue work in the aftermath of Katrina the key to her death? Or does the sheaf of photos in her work files hold the answer? Will Faye and Joe be the next innocents engulfed in this deadly deception?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPoisoned Pen Press
    Release dateMay 27, 2010
    ISBN9781615952342
    Unavailable
    Floodgates
    Author

    Mary Anna Evans

    Mary Anna Evans is the author of the Faye Longchamp archeological mysteries, which have won the Benjamin Franklin Award, the Mississippi Author Award, and three Florida Book Awards bronze medals. The winner of the 2018 Sisters in Crime (SinC) Academic Research Grant, she is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches fiction and nonfiction writing.

    Read more from Mary Anna Evans

    Related to Floodgates

    Related ebooks

    Mystery For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Living Days

      Nov 4, 2019

      The Living Days
      9 min read

    • Article

      Body Language

      Aug 14, 2019

      Body Language
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Last Friend on Earth

      May 4, 2023

      It was as if Doreen Saunders had been waiting for me, passing the time until my arrival. She might as well have been sitting in a rocking chair, knitting needles clicking, jam tarts cooling on the side, the door wide open, waiting for the next visito

      6 min read

    • Article

      Hogwash!

      May 17, 2021

      Hogwash!
      3 min read

    • Article

      Hogwash!

      May 17, 2021

      Hogwash!
      3 min read

    • Article

      J. Jezewska Stevens

      Dec 15, 2017

      The party was a failure. I can’t even tell you what a failure it was. There are no words. Only a great pain in my chest when I wake up. On the veranda. It’s better when I sit in the chair. Oh, but then I can see around. The gauzy curtains, pushed by

      15 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      3 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      Our house in the 100-year flood plainflooded. They say thatfor another 800 years a hurricanelike this will not come. My internetis down and my smart phone hurts my thumbsarthritic. I’m running out of data.All my books are in boxes. Please referto my

      3 min read

    • Article

      Second Language

      Aug 14, 2017

      Second Language
      9 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 1, 2021

      If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied. —Rudyard Kipling, “Epitaphs of the War,” The Years Between, 1919 She consulted me, a glance, and said: “I think not anything off the wagon. It arrives too quickly. Let’s have somethi

      4 min read

    • Article

      As the World Collapses

      Jul 27, 2017

      As the World Collapses
      7 min read

    • Article

      Parallels, Part One

      Jan 5, 2023

      The big question about UFOs is: where do they come from? There have always been several sides to any discussion of where any UFOs and their occupants might originate – with outer space just one option. But there is another. Because there is support f

      4 min read

    • Article

      Lockdown Stories

      Nov 13, 2020

      Lockdown Stories
      6 min read

    • Article

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • Article

      To Be In A State Of War

      Jul 6, 2023

      To Be In A State Of War
      15 min read

    • Article

      On Country

      Nov 9, 2016

      On Country
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Symposium On The Mysterious

      Sep 1, 2023

      A Symposium On The Mysterious
      24 min read

    • Article

      George Bradley

      Jun 8, 2021

      Penicillin was discovered in a moldy petri dishin 1928 and by the forties was called a miracle drugand by the fifties had become both widely availableand cheap, which is to say that penicillin arrivedin time for me, who without it would have dieda ch

      1 min read

    Reviews for Floodgates

    3.5/5

    26 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Faye and Joe are in New Orleans doing archeology on a Civil War site when a body is found in the Lower Ninth. The setting is post-Katrina and the Lower Ninth is the area that has still not recovered from all the horrors of that hurricane.

      There are murders and attempted murders and several bait 'n switch on who dunnit but as usual there was a lot of good history both ancient and recent. The parts about the engineering feats that keep a city below sea level and surrounded by ocean, river and lake dry are fascinating.

      I was a little worried when I realized this story was set in New Orleans post-Katrina because so many people want to point fingers at what went wrong there. Evans avoids this, she has spent more time talking about the human toll and the survivor guilt than about which politician, government entity or engineering design "failed". I admire that -- it made for a good read, a feeling of understanding what happened and a rip roaring good mystery.

      Looking forward to more.
    • 4/5
      Faye Longchamp is taking a break from her doctoral studies in archaeology -- she has a consulting job in post-Katrina New Orleans. Faye is on hand when a body is found in a flood-ravaged, abandoned building. With her scientist's eyes, she sees that something's not right -- that the body probably was not that of another flood victim. Police detective Jodi Bienvenu and Faye click immediately and in a snap Faye -- and eventually her fiance Joe Wolf Mantooth -- become police consultants on the case. Then a member of Faye's crew of archaeologists is attacked -- and Faye wants to get to the bottom of that crime, too. Although I enjoyed reading Floodgates, I thought it lacked the sharp focus of the earlier books in the series. The lengthy book excerpts were a distraction to me, and the character of author Louie Godtschalk was in the story for no reason I could figure out. As usual the bits of history, geology, engineering and archaeology were interesting -- as was the author's colorful portrait of the city of New Orleans. This review is based on an author-provided copy. 02/11/2010
    • 4/5
      The fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina brings readers two very different crime novels. Kenneth Abel's forthcoming Down in the Flood takes readers into the heart of the storm and the following flood, with all of its violence. Mary Anna Evans' Floodgates is set in the present, but the viewpoint of an archaeologist looking back is equally powerful.Faye Longchamp and her small crew is excavating a plantation site near Chalmette, the site of Andrew Jackson's 1815 victory. Faye is visiting a park ranger's neighborhood to see the destruction when a church group uncovers a body. But, as an archaeologist, Faye doesn't like the appearance of the bones. Her suspicions are shared by Detective Jodi Bienvenu who believed Faye, and thought the house was a crime scene. The people of New Orleans might have been used to bodies turning up for quite a while after Katrina, but Faye did not expect to learn that the body was that of a fellow archaeologist, Shelly Broussard. Shelly was a friend to Nina, a woman on Faye's crew. And, Shelly had been as outspoken about the failing levees as Nina herself was. When Nina has an accident, the question is, was it because of her televised comments about the levees, or because of her friendship with the dead woman? Detective Bienvenu hires Faye and her fiancé, Joe Wolf Mantooth, as consultants in her investigation. She respected their intuition, their curiosity, and their knowledge. And, as the two questioned others as to Shelly's last days, rescuing people from Katrina, they began to respect the dead woman. And, Faye and Jodi did not want to see a murderer get away. Faye said it. "Maybe somebody needed to dispose of a corpse in late August 2005. What better solution than to take that body to a flooded-out house and sink it to the floor? It would be weeks before anybody found it and, when they did, nobody would look at it and think, Murder victim. Nope. The long list of lives taken by Hurricane Katrina would simply be inflated by one...and a murderer would walk free."Floodgates looks at Hurricane Katrina from a historian's viewpoint. In the course of Faye's investigation, she meets with other archaeologists, historians and engineers who know the history of New Orleans, the levees and the flooding of the city. All of those elements are important in the loss of life in New Orleans. This is the fifth in the Faye Longchamp series, but it's one that seems to bring Faye to life even more than previous mysteries. Her investigation makes her aware of her own life, her love of Joe, her need for a friend. She works a case in which she's respected from the very beginning, and Faye's working in a city where her multiracial background isn't unusual. Evans' own love of the city comes through in Faye's pleasure in it. This is a quieter story of Katrina than Abel's book. This one looks back through a historian's eyes. But, Faye's eyes are worth looking through, to understand our own recent past as history. Readers interested in what happened in New Orleans can read this book, without having read the previous ones in the series. Floodgates is the most polished, and most fascinating, of Evans' books. She skillfully mixes history, engineering, and the story of the city, with a mystery. Faye Longchamp has grown into an accomplished woman, and a knowledgeable amateur sleuth. She's an outsider looking back at New Orleans, but, she's an outsider that shares a love many people feel for that lost city. Floodgates is a powerful mystery of a city, and people, that embody love and loss.