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Hannah Smith and Liberty Grace Tupplemeyer are atypical southern belles. Hannah's family tree does have roots that extend back to very notable people in Florida's civil war history, and Liberty Grace ("Birdy") is from a very wealthy family. However, Hannah makes her living as a light tackle fishing guide around Sanibel and the Captiva Islands of Florida, occasionally taking on investigations. Birdy is a Deputy Sheriff, who will inherit her aunt Bunny Tupplemeyer's fortune.
Aunt Bunny has invested in a land development scheme that has a house on property that is protected by the Florida historical properties law. The idea is that this house could be the capstone to the development as a community center in a park for residents. Local lore has it that the house is haunted, and civil war artifacts and a human skull have turned up on the property. Aunt Bunny would like to have the facts sorted from fiction and prove that the former landowner knew the property was "stigmatized," that is, one that had a reputation that makes it undesirable, and undevelopable when she bought it, allowing her to bring suit against the seller. She wants Hannah's help to prove this.
This book has everything - lost treasure, vicious chimpanzees, venomous snakes, a trio of fortune telling witches, and a manipulative ego maniac. It is a wild chase through history and along Florida rivers that will keep you turning the pages. There is also a lot of civil war history that was new to me and very interesting in HAUNTED. For example: according to the book, a lack of salt played a pivotal role in the war.
However there are too many characters in this book, making it feel unfocused. Few are trustworthy, all are interesting, but they have their own motives which spreads this narrative too thin. Instead of a few well-developed strands of inquiry there are many lightly touched on. Two people have been lost in the area and never found, a human skull is found near civil war artifacts, a mysterious woman has been seen on the balcony at the house, a lost treasure cache of a hundred civil war dollars provides an intense and deadly motivation to find it, and close to the end of the story it is discovered that another man has mysteriously disappeared.
Finally some of the events in the book seem far-fetched. An RV park is located not too far from the mystery house, and sightings of an ape man or a strange deformed human have been reported there. It is also the sight of a serpentarium where Hannah is imprisoned in a room filled with venomous snakes. Hannah releases the snakes to create a diversion so that she can escape, and miraculously, the only one bitten is the intended victim. Later she and four others (one a chimpanzee) cross a field, where Hannah can hear the snakes moving and still no one is bitten.
This was a very good read that kept me completely entertained throughout. Its greatest weakness is that there is too much happening, rather than too little. I would really like to get to know Hannah and Birdy better. I hope in the next book of the series we will see Hannah out on the rivers more, and more of Birdy in her role as Deputy Sheriff, where I believe the strength of this book lies.
§Megan Sweeney is an art teacher at the Tuxedo Park School, an independent school in upstate New York. She eats, sleeps, reads, knits, and occasionally makes her own artwork in the nearby town of Monroe, New York where she lives.
Reviewed by Megan Sweeney, August 2014
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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