Because so many of you like murder mysteries I am posting my favorite historical- medical - mystery series:
OK the link didn't work. Here are summaries;
Benjamin January Mysteries
A Free Man of Color
New Orleans in the 1830s is a place of change mixed with tradition. Benjamin January, a free man of color, has returned home after many years in Paris, fleeing a city that seems to speak his dead wife's name every time he turns around.
A musician and doctor, Benjamin is en route to a Carnival octaroon ball when a masked young woman calls for help in the street, shouting his name. After rescuing her, and progressing to the ball in time to start the first dance, he realizes the woman was an old piano student of his. Between dances, he slips out to see her, for Madeline, a white woman, has defied custom and tradition by invading the octaroon (to go into what all the names for colored people in New Orleans at this time mean would take up too much space, but it's in the introduction) ball January is playing for - a ball for white men and their colored mistresses, their placees. Next door, in another, adjoining ballroom, are the white sisters, mothers, and wives of these same men, (as Hambly puts it, wondering with pretend ignorance where their menfolk could have gone to...). January urges Madeline to leave before someone recognizes her and her reputation is ruined. She, however, refuses to leave unless he sets up a meeting for her with the octaroon woman she has come to see - the most flamboyant of the free women of color present, Angelique, the placee of Madeline's recently deceased husband. Between the next set of dances, January does attempt to find Angelique, but she runs him off when a prospective lover enters the room. He returns to the ballroom proper and begins playing again. When Angelique disappears before the evening's planned tableaux, Benjamin watches with amusement as his sister Dominique, and her friends, search frantically for the girl - amusement that turns to horror when Angelique is found dead. When the police come to investigate, January realizes that he is the last person to have seen the girl alive, since the young man she was with when he left the room has fled to a country estate and is hiding from questioning. The social climate is already chilly toward men of color, even free ones, and January finds himself having to go to great lengths to have to clear his name - and to find out what really did happen to Angelique during the Mardi Gras ball.
Check out the signature on the front cover of this book.
Published by Bantam Books, July, 1997.
Fever Season
"Bronze John" stalks through the summer-hot streets of New Orleans in the second Benjamin January mystery. A cholera epidemic has seized New Orleans, sending the upper eschelons of both colored and white society to cooler and safer locations. Benjamin remains in New Orleans to treat the sick and dying, where he becomes tangled with a runaway slave girl named Cora, who is wanted for poisoning her master, Otis Redfern, and stealing several thousand dollars. But Benjamin isn't sure she was truly the culprit. Then Cora goes missing, like several other colored people before her. In searching for Cora, Benjamin meets up with Cora's friend, Rose Vitrac, a free woman of color who runs a school for girls in New Orleans. Rose and Benjamin work to find Cora and untangle the mystery of Otis Redfern's death and Cora's disappearance, helped along the way by the usual suspects of Hannibal and Abishag Shaw. And even when most of the clues fall into place, there are still surprises left. Interestingly, this book was based on a true historical incident, which was fairly horrific in nature, and this is detailed in the afterward.
Published by Bantam Books, July, 1998.
Graveyard Dust
Number three in the Benjamin January series.
Published by Bantam Books, July, 1999.
Sold Down the River
It was rather bizarre request, really. What free man of color would give up what few freedoms he possessed to return to life as a slave?
But when Benjamin January’s old master, Simon Fourchet appears in his mother’s parlor one autumn day, Ben does just that. On Mon Triomphe, Fourchet’s plantation, someone - or something - is wreaking havoc with the sugar harvest, the roulaison, the busiest and most grueling time of year for the entire plantation. Strange voodoo marks have appeared, an unknown poisoner tampering with the master’s wine cellar accidentally claims the life of a pilfering valet, a fire and accident at plantation’s sugar mill claim both precious harvest time and a life. January goes to Mon Triomphe with Hannibal Sefton - his incorrigible and opium-addicted fiddler friend - under the pretense of being his valet, and is “loaned” to Fourchet to help get the harvest in. He and Abishag Shaw contrive a system of messages in case something goes wrong, and cache copies of his freedom papers. It is with this admittedly miniscule protection that he goes into the situation.
For January, the life of a field hand is torture tinged with memory; his boyhood was spent in just such a place, and the lives of the other slaves mesh with his in the community made up of shared experience. It is because of these others that he is there as a spy - in the edge-balanced life of a plantation, when the entire group of slaves can and will be blamed for the poisoning, the sabotage of the harvest, for January to find the culprit will mean to save the others from the consequences of shared blame. But to find the culprit, he learns, means to find a motive, and on Mon Triomphe, there are more motives than one can shake a stick at. Revenge, in many forms, creates a rich background of possibilities for a culprit.
But when Hannibal leaves for a short trip and never returns, and Fourchet lies on his deathbed, the identity of the sabotager may not do January any good at all.
Hambly creates, as usual, a rich and intriguing world in which her characters move. The tone of this one is slightly darker than the three previous January books, and this is mostly due to the setting. In writing about the lives of the slaves of Mon Triomphe, neither they nor her readers are spared. However, despite this, she manages to bring out the feeling of shared community, a feeling that although life is admittedly terrible, there is a knack to living it, and a way to have something that can neither be measured nor sold. The ending is (thankfully, for those still reeling from the end of Knight of the Demon Queen) both resolved and fairly happy, if in a bittersweet way.
Published by Bantam Books on July 5, 2000.
Die Upon A Kiss
Book five. The title comes from the play Othello, in case you're curious, and the book is about opera in New Orleans.
I kissed thee ere I killed thee. No way but this,
Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.
-Othello
Published by Bantam Books on June 19, 2001.
Wet Grave
Book six, the "Jean Lafitte's Treasure Hunt book"
Published on June 25, 2002.
Days of the Dead
Benjamin January number 7, publication date July 2003 (paperback April, 2004). This book takes place in Mexico City, and includes the first encounter of January and Hannibal.
Dead Water
Published on August 3, 2004. Dead Water at the Bantam publisher's site, includes an excerpt for those of you who'd like a preview.
Last edited by pickledpepperRN : Dec 05, 2004 at 11:58 AM.
Reason: link didn't work
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