Fever Season (Benjamin January, Book 2) - Softcover

Hambly, Barbara

4.11

1,681 ratings by Goodreads

9780553575279: Fever Season (Benjamin January, Book 2)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553575279 ISBN 13: 9780553575279

Publisher: Bantam, 1999

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Benjamin January made his debut in bestselling author Barbara Hambly's A Free Man of Color, a haunting m�lange of history and mystery. Now he returns in another novel of greed, madness, and murder amid the dark shadows and dazzling society of old New Orleans, named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.

The summer of 1833 has been one of brazen heat and brutal pestilence, as the city is stalked by Bronze John—the popular name for the deadly yellow fever epidemic that tests the healing skills of doctor and voodoo alike. Even as Benjamin January tends the dying at Charity Hospital during the steaming nights, he continues his work as a music teacher during the day.

When he is asked to pass a message from a runaway slave to the servant of one of his students, January finds himself swept into a tempest of lies, greed, and murder that rivals the storms battering New Orleans. And to find the truth he must risk his freedom...and his very life.

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Review:

In New Orleans in 1833, appearance is everything for people of color. "His own coat and waistcoat ... were one badge of his freedom," Barbara Hambly writes about Ben January, a surgeon and teacher of music. "Even more than the papers the law demanded he carry--and as much as the well-bred French his tutors and his mother had hammered into him as a child--they said, This is a free man of color, not somebody's property to be bought and sold." When the veteran science fiction writer Hambly first introduced January, in the stunning and heartbreaking A Free Man of Color, the only problem seemed to be that the book told us so much about a vanished world that it couldn't possibly support a sequel. Fortunately, Hambly has found a way to make it work by putting January into a real crime, the case of a woman named Delphine Lalaurie whose savagery toward her slaves managed to shock even her contemporaries. "She was a tall woman, imperially straight; and though nearly every Creole woman of her age had surrendered to rich food and embonpoint, she retained the slim figure of a girl," Hambly writes of the majestic Delphine on her first meeting with January. She has come to the reeking, corpse-clogged hospital where January is working during a cholera epidemic to warn him about helping a runaway slave girl accused of murder. Ignoring that warning puts January into a situation so full of danger to himself and others that in lesser hands it could easily have become overwrought. Hambly, however, knows better than anyone that readers connect to characters rooted in honesty, regardless of how alien their environment may seem to us. --Dick Adler

From the Back Cover:

"Superb. Exciting and compelling."
--King Features Syndicate

"Stunning. From the highborn Creoles to the uncivilized Americans, Hambly knows all their secrets and brings them all to life."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Fever Season reaffirms Hambly's claim to be a notable writer of mystery fiction."
--The Washington Times

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