Strangers - Mary Anna Evans

Synopsis : Strangers - Book #6 Faye Longchamp Mysteries - October 2010

Strangers, Mary Anna Evans’ sixth novel about Faye and her now husband, Joe Wolf Mantooth, braids together the histories of St. Augustine, Florida, a priest, a house, and its past and present owners. It also presents murder and, possibly, kidnapping. Here then is something of a tale by the Brothers Grimm whose Gothics include Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, The Frog Prince….

Dunkirk House is the site of a Jazz Age murder, the scandal surrounding a Hollywood starlet’s supposed affair with its owner, and the virtual disappearance of the man’s wife from society thereafter. Now it’s a B&B in all its glory: twin stone towers, lush neglected gardens, mysteriously filled in swimming pool, attic and grounds brimful of artifacts. So, a kind of Manderly, echoing Rebecca. I love a good Gothic.

Founded in 1565, St. Augustine is the oldest US city continuously occupied by Europeans. Bad news for the Timucua, the native residents, especially as the Spanish conquistadors were accompanied by priests intent on crushing all who did not embrace their faith.

Thus comes in the story of Father Domingo, a man filled with faith and fervor who became so disillusioned by the greed and rapacity and dogma of his colleagues that he went native. It’s all there in passages in a diary translated haltingly by archaeologist Faye Longchamp after its discovery in the attic of Dunkirk House, where Faye’s fledgling consulting firm has a contract to excavate. In Florida, as we crime fiction aficionados know, every day is just a (dangerous) step ahead of evil developers….

This is a story, too, about pregnancy—with a sleuth in Faye who is immensely pregnant, on the thresh hold of giving birth, and filled with free floating fears—made the more poignant by the women of Dunkirk House whose children have died. It’s a story about losses and new beginnings. And about murder….