Review by Beth Slater, Gumshoe

Adjunct sheriff’s scuba diver and linguistics professor Luanne Fogarty returns in her 6th adventure, bringing us back to the secretive, swampy areas of the little known north Florida region. It’s almost Halloween, and Luanne and sometime lover Vernon are taking a break from routine and enjoying a walking tour in a neighboring county when the group finds bones in an old slave graveyard. Vernon, a sheriff, recognizes immediately that these bones aren’t decades old – well, they haven’t been buried for decades. This begins a strange sequence of events which is exacerbated by the usual Southern idiosyncrasies, making Luanne wonder if the strange sounds she hears around her swamp cabin are the denizens of the marsh — or something more dangerous?

Halloween has taken on something of a ghoulish tinge this year for Luanne. The walking tour not only found recent bones in more than one spot, but one of their group seriously injures herself in the forest. The young woman is a student at the local university where Luanne teaches linguistics, and she was on the tour with three of her friends. Luanne is pressured often to perform for the sheriff’s office in between her regular class schedule; she is called in to dive into an algae-covered stagnant pond and finds more skeletal remains and then is sent into a clear, spring-fed creek with a resident alligator that has been fed by humans. (For those unfamiliar with this problem, alligators often end up attacking humans looking for food once they get used to being fed).

Caught between three separate forces — the Reverend Billy and his reluctant cohort Olivia Jourdain who want the slave graveyard made an historical landmark — the Reverend Jensen whose church and cemetery is next to the slave graveyard and won’t relocate — and lastly the family who owns the land where all the bones have been discovered in both counties — Luanne watches as the authorities vie for jurisdiction. As an adjunct, Luanne isn’t always constrained by legalities like her co-workers and is able to move about more freely — in and out of the swamp. But fear for her friends drives her to discover what ghosts might be haunting amongst the rising mists in her corner of the world — ghosts that have even spooked the long-time residents — but will she be able to exorcise them without becoming one herself?

I could not put this book down, although it made me terribly homesick! I’ve read Alam’s previous work and enjoyed it immensely, but something about this one seemed to build up the suspense in its sequence of events that drew me in. I can’t say I didn’t have an idea about what the plot was, but it didn’t matter. Luanne’s laid back demeanor seems to enhance the other characters, and her neighbors are quintessential reclusive Floridians whose humor brings out the best of them all. Some violence but a great read!