The Marsh Queen

by Virginia Hartman

Overview

For fans of Where the Crawdads Sing, this “marvelous debut” (Alice McDermott, National Book Award–winning author of The Ninth Hour) follows a Washington, DC, artist as she faces her past and the secrets held in the waters of Florida’s lush swamps and wetlands.

Loni Murrow is an accomplished bird artist at the Smithsonian who loves her job. But when she receives a call from her younger brother summoning her back home to help their obstinate mother recover after an accident, Loni’s neat, contained life in Washington, DC, is thrown into chaos, and she finds herself exactly where she does not want to be.

Going through her mother’s things, Loni uncovers scraps and snippets of a time in her life she would prefer to forget—a childhood marked by her father Boyd’s death by drowning and her mother Ruth’s persistent bad mood. When Loni comes across a single, cryptic note from a stranger—“There are some things I have to tell you about Boyd’s death”— she begins a dangerous quest to discover the truth, all the while struggling to reconnect with her mother and reconcile with her brother and his wife, who seem to thwart her at every turn. To make matters worse, she meets a man in Florida whose attractive simple charm threatens everything she’s worked toward.

Pulled between worlds—her professional accomplishments in Washington, and the small town of her childhood—Loni must decide whether to delve beneath the surface into murky half-truths and either avenge the past or bury it, once and for all.

The Marsh Queen explores what it means to be a daughter and how we protect the ones we love. Suzanne Feldman, author of Sisters of the Great War, writes that “fans of Delia Owens and Lauren Groff will find this a wonderful and absorbing read.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982171605
Publisher:	Gallery Books
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	97,137
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Virginia Hartman has an MFA in creative writing from American University and is on the faculty at George Washington University. Her stories have been shortlisted for the New Letters Awards and the Dana Awards. The Marsh Queen is her first novel. Find out more at VirginiaHartman.com.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1 1
If I were a different person, I could move forward and never look back, never try to fathom the forces that shaped me for the worse. But there are times when a fog rolls in, slow as dusk, beginning with a nodule of regret. I should have, why didn’t I, if only. I replay the day my father left us for good, the sun showing orange through the live oak, him pacing at the bottom of the porch steps, twelve-year-old me looking down with my baby brother, Philip, on one hip. I winced as I gently extracted a strand of my dark brown hair from his doughy little grasp.

Daddy bounced his feet on the bottom step and squinted up. “Look, darlin’. Miss Joleen next door can help your mama with the baby. So how’s about it, Loni Mae? You comin’ with me?”

My dad hadn’t gone fishing in months. But he’d grown restless, knocking into furniture and slamming the screen door. There was a thrumming in the house like the wind before a storm.

That day, my mother said, “Boyd, go on! You’re pacing the house like a caged animal.”

I’d have given almost anything to be out fishing in the swamp with him, to draw every creature I saw, to watch and listen as before. But how could I? I had to stay. Now that Philip was here, I served a purpose in my house. I held him while my mother talked on the phone, while she rested or did housework. I knew how to make him laugh those hiccupy laughs. He was my after-school activity, my weekend amusement, my part-time job. My mother no longer shook her head at my hopelessness, nor raised her eyes to heaven.

Daddy turned, and his boots crunched gravel. He retrieved his fishing pole and tackle from the garage. I put the tip of my braid in my mouth and sucked it to a fine point as he walked out to the end of the dock, his khaki vest sagging with lead weights and lures, the tackle box a drag on his left arm. He turned and looked back for a minute, tilting his head so his face caught the light. I put my hand up to wave, but a shaft of sun was in his eyes, and he didn’t see. He swiveled back toward the jon boat, stepped in, and he was gone.

He could have slept at the fishing camp, that faded two-room cabin that stuck out over a muddy bank, or he might have gone on patrol right after his swamp time. But on Monday morning, his Fish & Game uniform still hung in the closet at home, pressed and waiting.

Around three, my dad’s boss stopped over. Captain Chappelle was tall and fit in his khaki uniform, his boots clunking up the porch steps. My mother was out the door before he’d reached the top stair.

“Hello, Ruth. Just came by to see if Boyd was sick or what.”

My mother turned to me. “Go on, Loni. Get to your chores.” Two vertical lines between her eyebrows told me not to argue.

I couldn’t hear what they said, though from the kitchen I strained to make words from the low tones in the Florida room. I wiped the last dish and heard Captain Chappelle’s truck kicking up gravel in the driveway.

The weather turned cool that night, sweatshirt weather, and still Daddy didn’t return. Long after I’d gone to bed, I heard voices and went to the top of the stairs.

“I shoulda seen it, Ruth.” It was a man’s voice—Captain Chappelle. The Florida room’s square panes of glass would be black now, the marsh invisible behind them. The darkened banister glowed with the light from downstairs, and Captain Chappelle’s voice rippled with a watery sound. “Boyd hadn’t been himself lately. I just never thought he’d go and—”

“No,” my mother said.

“Had he been acting strangely around home? Depressed? Because these last few weeks—”

“No,” she said louder.

Captain Chappelle’s voice dropped to a murmur, but words floated up to me. Drowned... intentional... weighted down...

My mother kept repeating, “No.”

“We’ll fix it up, Ruth. Boating accidents happen every day.”

“Not to my Boyd.”

At the funeral home, I stepped away from the varnished wood box and listened.

Such a terrible accident.

What a shame.

It could happen to anybody, out in a boat.

You just never know when it’s your time.

So it was an accident. Those other words, floating up along the staircase, had just been a bad dream.

After the funeral, my mother and I took Philip home and we didn’t talk about Daddy. If we didn’t speak his name, maybe we could erase the knowledge that he’d never come back.

Editorial Reviews

05/09/2022

Hartman debuts with a well-crafted and fast-paced family drama set in the Florida panhandle. As a girl raised on the edge of a marsh, Loni Murrow adores her Fish and Game officer father, Boyd. When Loni is 12, Boyd dies in what some insist is a boating accident, though others hint at suicide. Hartman flashes forward to the present day, 25 years later, with Loni working at the Smithsonian as a bird artist. When her brother, Phil, summons her to deal with their mother, Ruth, who has a broken wrist and possible dementia, Loni is plunged back into the small town she had hoped to leave behind. Phil and his hairdresser wife are moving Ruth into assisted living much too expeditiously for Loni’s taste, and selling Ruth’s house. Loni’s attraction to a canoe-rental proprietor, comforting visits with her dad’s avuncular former boss, and illustration work offered by her best friend at a science museum in Tallahassee keep her grounded as she investigates Boyd’s death, prompted by a mysterious letter found at Ruth’s house. The closer she gets to the truth, the more someone tries to scare her away with disturbing anonymous threats. Hartman’s depiction of the natural setting show her to be a talented writer, as do the well-executed takes on museum work, botany, and ornithology. Readers will hope to see Loni back for more. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

04/01/2022

DEBUT Hartman's first novel is interwoven with strong natural history themes, evoking the works of Barbara Kingsolver. Raised in the swamps of northern Florida, Loni Mae is now a bird artist with a plum job at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC. When her mother starts showing signs of dementia, she returns to her hometown to help her brother sort through their mother's belongings, all the while stumbling over clues that seem to indicate their father's decades-ago death wasn't a suicide. On a quickly diminishing family leave, Loni Mae is unable to chart a path forward. She goes about her disorganized days juggling family expectations, questioning townsfolk about her father's death, sketching birds, and skittishly avoiding romance with a local man. The nonlinear story line is interspersed with long passages on drawing birds, the Floridian swamp, and gardening lore. Four-fifths of the way through the book, the action suddenly picks up when Loni Mae uncovers town secrets that threaten her understanding of the past. Her subsequent undertakings occur at an incongruously breakneck pace before the story wraps up a little too neatly with a family gathering at the nursing home. VERDICT Recommended for those who prefer happy endings.—Erin O. Romanyshyn

Library Journal

2022-07-08
A dutiful family visit propels a young woman into the dark mysteries of her past.

Loni Murrow loves her job as an ornithological illustrator for the Smithsonian, where she has dreamed of working since girlhood. Raised in the tiny Florida Panhandle town of Tenetkee, she high-tailed out of there as soon as she was old enough. She and her mother, Ruth, never got along, especially after Loni’s father, Boyd, died when she was 12. His death was ruled an accidental drowning, but the Florida Fish & Game agent and inveterate angler knew the waters better than anyone, and rumors swirl. Loni reluctantly takes a leave from work and heads south after her mother breaks her wrist in a fall. When she gets to Tenetkee, she discovers her earnest younger brother, Phil, and his bossy wife, Tammy, have already stuck Mom in assisted living and found tenants for her house. Oh, and Ruth is well along into dementia, her house is a wreck, her memory’s intermittent, and her attitude toward her daughter is as mean as ever. Loni hopes to get her settled and return to Washington quickly, but a mysterious note she finds in Ruth’s suitcase sends her looking for the truth about Boyd. She looks for answers from his former boss, the kindly Capt. Chappelle, and other friends and neighbors. But someone who doesn’t appreciate her investigation vandalizes her car. As Tenetkee grows to seem more ominous than laid back, Loni finds solace in canoeing its waterways—and in a growing friendship with Adlai Brinkert, the handsome fellow who owns the canoe rental shop. The book’s lyrical evocations of natural Florida, beautiful but perilous, ring true, as does its depiction of the entanglements of small-town life. Family dynamics are a strong point, and the author builds suspense skillfully as Loni unearths connections between past and present that could be lethal.

This debut novel, set in rural Florida, deftly combines family drama and tense thriller.

Kirkus Reviews

Hartman’s first novel is interwoven with strong natural history themes, evoking the works of Barbara Kingsolver.”
—Library Journal

“Steeped in the lush rhythms and murky shadows of the Florida Wetlands, Virginia Hartman’s The Marsh Queen is at once a gripping mystery, a devastating family drama, a romance, and a tribute to the natural world. Loni Murrow is a character who will stay with me for a long time. An astonishing debut.”
—Lara Prescott, author of The Secrets We Kept

“Part romance, part mystery, The Marsh Queen unwinds its entangled story lines with measured grace. Virginia Hartman shares with her bird artist narrator a keen eye and a precise touch, as well as a wry understanding of the way the natural world comforts and sustains. This is a marvelous debut, witty and wise.”
—Alice McDermott, National Book Award-winning author of The Ninth Hour

“A unique blend of literature and mystery, with deft evocations of Florida’s flora and sometimes malignant fauna, The Marsh Queen finds a compelling Southern-noir niche all its own and marks Virginia Hartman as a writer to watch.”
—Louis Bayard, author of Courting Mr. Lincoln, Lucky Strikes, and The Pale Blue Eye

“The setting is distinctive, Loni is like a girl-detective grown up, and it crackles with trouble and action.”
—Ellen Prentiss Campbell, author of Frieda’s Song

“Subtle and complex, The Marsh Queen navigates the currents and backwaters of family relationships, the Florida swamplands, and a mysterious death that occurred twenty-five years before. Like Barbara Kingsolver, Hartman delves deep into the natural world to explore her characters, and in this case, the connections between one haunted woman and the waters that took her father's life. Fans of Delia Owens and Lauren Groff will find this a wonderful and absorbing read.”
—Suzanne Feldman, author of Sisters of the Great War

From the Publisher