Fiction, Mystery & Crime, Peoples & Cultures - Fiction

Sold Down the River (Benjamin January Series #4)

Name: Sold Down the River (Benjamin January Series #4)
Author: Barbara Hambly
ISBN: 9780553575293

by Barbara Hambly

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Overview

When slave owner Simon Fourchet asks Benjamin January to investigate sabotage, arson, and murder on his plantation, January is reluctant to do any favors for the savage man who owned him until he was seven. But he knows too well that plantation justice means that if the true culprit is not found, every slave on Mon Triomphe will suffer.

Abandoning his Parisian French for the African patois of a field hand, cutting cane until his bones ache and his musician's hands bleed, Benjamin must use all his intelligence and cunning to find the killer ... or find himself sold down the river.

Synopsis

Penetrating the murkiest corners of glittering New Orleans society, Benjamin January brought murderers to justice in A Free Man of Color, Fever Season, and Graveyard Dust. Now, in Barbara Hambly's haunting new novel, he risks his life in a violent plantation world darker than anything in the city....

When slave owner Simon Fourchet asks Benjamin January to investigate sabotage, arson, and murder on his plantation, January is reluctant to do any favors for the savage man who owned him until he was seven. But he knows too well that plantation justice means that if the true culprit is not found, every slave on Mon Triomphe will suffer.

Abandoning his Parisian French for the African patois of a field hand, cutting cane until his bones ache and his musician's hands bleed, Benjamin must use all his intelligence and cunning to find the killer ... or find himself sold down the river.

Romantic Times - Toby Bromberg

The world of antebellum New Orleans becomes our own in Sold Down the River. January's predicament becomes so real to us that we agonize over his situation with him. This is an intense story that will capture your mind as it sets you to thinking.

About the Author, Barbara Hambly

Barbara Hambly attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux, France, obtaining a master's degree in medieval history. She has worked as both a teacher and a technical editor, but her first love has always been history. Ms. Hambly lives in Los Angeles with two Pekingese, a cat, and another writer.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

When he agrees to pose as a slave to unmask a killer on the Mon Triomphe sugar plantation, Benjamin January -- physician, musician and free man of color -- confronts more than he can handle as he steps into a web of betrayal, voodoo and murder.

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

In this "interesting and well-written" period mystery, which penetrates the murkiest corners of New Orleans society, Benjamin January risks his life in a plantation world darker than anything he's experienced in the city. Unfortunately, "being greeted with a two-page glossary was a turnoff" to some readers. And the conceit of January going undercover as a slave was a "bit unrealistic," but "the author has done her historical homework and gives the reader a real sense of the times."

Toby Bromberg

Publishers Weekly

The darkest time in American history comes alive in Hambley's unforgettable series of mysteries, of which this is the fourth, after Graveyard Dust. In 1835 New Orleans, Benjamin January is a Paris-educated surgeon and musician, but he's also a former slave. Along with white American policeman Abishag Shaw, Ben is asked to help out on an investigation into possible sabotage and murder at a sugar plantation up the river from the city. The catch is that the person asking is his former owner, the thoroughly evil Simon Fourchet. Ben must go to Fourchet's plantation, Mon Triomphe, and work undercover as a slave, chopping the sugarcane in the fields. Ben agrees to take on the dreadful job because he knows that if the "hoodoo" isn't found quickly, the lives and well-being of many slaves will be in jeopardy. Already, "les blankittes" (the whites) believe a slave revolt is brewing on the plantation, and their punishment of the slaves will surely be terrible if more incidents occur. In order to learn the truth, Ben has to undergo all the appalling and humiliating experiences that the plantation slaves routinely endure. Hambly's fiercely burning picture of the horrors of slavery inevitably overwhelms the specifics of the plot, but she evokes the period marvelously, piling detail upon detail to create a finely wrought portrait of the daily lives of slaves on the notorious Louisiana sugar plantations. And her mastery of the slave songs, the backbreaking labor of the harvest, the African-French-Creole culture and the medicine (both traditional and voodoo) is astonishing. (July) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

School Library Journal

From The Critics

This Benjamin January mystery provides a smooth novel of suspense set in New Orleans and steeped with drama and tension. January searches for more music students to earn money but accepts a deal from a cruel former master instead. His investigation into a possible slave rebellion involves him in undercover espionage in this story of an ex-slave's probe.

Kirkus Reviews

Born into slavery on the Bellefleur Plantation, Benjamin January, a plum-dark Creole, was freed when St.-Denis Janvier bought his mother to make her his mistress and let her two children tag along. Now, 35 years later, January's former owner, the brutal Simon Fourchet, wants him to spy on the slaves at his other plantation, Mon Triomphe, to discover who's sabotaging the sugar-cane harvest, wrecking the mill, leaving ominous hoodoo messages on the walls, and fomenting a rebellion that could turn as deadly as Nat Turner's. Ben, a Paris-trained surgeon and New Orleans musician, agrees only because his refusal would expose all the slaves, not just the guilty ones, to whippings and worse. He arrives in Ascension Parish in the guise of a consumptive white man's valet and finds the butler dead of poisoned cognac; a lawsuit begun between Fourchet and the neighboring Daubrays; mysterious comings and goings in the bayous; second-wife problems; brother trouble; house servants disdaining field hands; and slave beatings even more severe than the one he suffered at the hand of Fourchet when he was a child of seven. But January's biggest worry when Fourchet dies and his "master" goes missing is that he will be enslaved again, this time forever. Searing degradation cloaks a classic whodunit. As in Ben's earlier adventures (Graveyard Dust, 1999, etc.), the white/black turmoil of the mid-19th century is depicted in fierce and lush clarity.