THE MARSH QUEEN

An absorbing family mystery set in the Florida wetlands that delves into past crimes, old memories, and the truth of parental love.

Loni Mae Murrow's life in Washington, DC is tidy, if a trifle constrained. In her mid-thirties, she's a bird artist at the Smithsonian who spends her days at a desk, making elaborate drawings of sparrows and scrub-jays and purple gallinules. Then she's summoned back home to the wetlands of northern Florida, where she grew up. Her mother has grown frail and forgetful and has been resentfully consigned to assisted living, and her brother, Phil, juggling a job and a wife and two young children, needs her help. Loni may not be her mother's only child, but there are some things only a daughter can do.

Although Florida, with its suffocating heat and difficult memories, is a place she thought she'd managed to get away from, Loni soon discovers that home is not so easily forgotten. Going through her mother's things, she finds a cryptic note from a woman whose name she doesn't recognize: "There are some things I have to tell you about Boyd's death," it reads.

Boyd is her father, a man who met a murky death in a boating accident out on the marsh when Loni was twelve and Phil just a baby. The circumstances of his death, long presumed a suicide, turn out to be murkier than anyone thought. Against her better judgment, Loni finds herself drawn into a quest to discover the truth about how he died.

Against the mottled landscape of her youth, she is led both away from and toward the truth about the past and its betrayals. One by one, the forces keeping her in Florida become stronger. Someone begins to threaten her as she uncovers pieces of her father's story, but she can't figure out who. In the midst of this danger, she struggles to reconnect with her mother through the remnants of their past and to reconcile with her brother and his pushy, provincial wife. And she fights an attraction to a man who encourages her to stay in the South even as she determines to return to her job in Washington. At last moved to avenge the wrongs done to her family, Loni has to decide whether to join the violence or end it.

Hartman's stories have been shortlisted for the New Letters Prize and the Dana Awards and have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Her writing has been supported by both the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She holds an MFA in creative writing from American University and is on the Creative Writing faculty at George Washington University. THE MARSH QUEEN is her first novel.