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A Free Man of Color (A Benjamin January Mystery Book 1) by [Barbara Hambly]

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Barbara Hambly

A Free Man of Color (A Benjamin January Mystery Book 1) Kindle Edition

by Barbara Hambly (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

136 ratings

Book 1 of 18: Benjamin January

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A lush and haunting novel of a city steeped in decadent pleasures . . . and of a man, proud and defiant, caught in a web of murder and betrayal.

It is 1833. In the midst of Mardi Gras, Benjamin January, a Creole physician and music teacher, is playing piano at the Salle d'Orleans when the evenings festivities are interrupted—by murder.

Ravishing Angelique Crozat, a notorious octoroon who travels in the city's finest company, has been strangled to death. With the authorities reluctant to become involved, Ben begins his own inquiry, which will take him through the seamy haunts of riverboatmen and into the huts of voodoo-worshipping slaves.

But soon the eyes of suspicion turn toward Ben—for, black as the slave who fathered him, this free man of color is still the perfect scapegoat. . . .

Praise for A Free Man of Color

“A smashing debut. Rich and exciting with both substance and spice.”—Star Tribune, Minneapolis

“A sparkling gem.”—King Features Syndicate

“An astonishing tour de force.”—Margaret Maron

“Superb.”—Drood Review of Mystery

“A darned good murder mystery.”—USA Today

Print length

280 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Bantam
Publication date

5 Jan. 2011
File size

2022 KB
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Review

"A smashing debut. Rich and exciting with both substance and spice."--Star Tribune, Minneapolis

"A sparkling gem."--King Features Syndicate

"An astonishing tour de force."--Margaret Maron

"Superb."--Drood Review of Mystery

"A darned good murder mystery."--USA Today --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Barbara Hambly is the author of Patriot Hearts and The Emancipator's Wife, a finalist for the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction. She is also the author of Fever Season, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and the acclaimed historical Benjamin January series, including the novels A Free Man of Color and Sold Down the River. She lives in California. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004HFRJBW
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bantam (5 Jan. 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2022 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 280 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 474,092 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 2,564 in Historical Thrillers (Kindle Store)
- 4,300 in Historical Mysteries (Kindle Store)
- 8,606 in British Detective Stories

Customer reviews:
136 ratings

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Barbara Hambly

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"Barbara Hambly (b. 1951) is a New York Times bestselling author of fantasy and science fiction, as well as historical novels set in the nineteenth century. After receiving a master’s degree in medieval history, she published The Time of the Dark, the first novel in the Darwath saga, in 1982, establishing herself as an author of serious speculative fiction. Since then she has created several series, including the Windrose Chronicles, Sun-Cross, and Sun Wolf and Starhawk, in addition to writing for the Star Wars and Star Trek universes.

Besides fantasy, Hambly has won acclaim for the James Asher vampire series, which won the Locus Award for best horror novel in 1989, and the Benjamin January mystery series, featuring a brilliant African-American surgeon in antebellum New Orleans. She lives in Los Angeles."

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Customer reviews

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3 star		8%
2 star		4%
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april

good writing, recommended!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 October 2015

Verified Purchase

packed with info, almost bursting with setting and characters...one can smell, feel, taste the milieu, but the plot is almost lost in all the incidents, and the ending is almost too miraculously fitting...but ok, good stuff!

Helpful

Stephanie De Pue

Balls, Baubles, Bangles, and Bright Shiny Carnival Beads

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 June 2015

An 1830s masked Carnival ball in New Orleans: what a great way to open a book. Author Barbara Hambly evidently did her homework for "A Free Man of Color:" you can almost hear the music, smell the sweat, taste the food, see the glittering diamonds, the intoxicating costumes. Outside on the streets, as ever, the mobs are also partying: wine, women and song, and the bright shiny carnival beads. But there is a downside to opening on a New Orleans masked ball: it feels like dozens of characters are thrown at us at once. They mainly all have confusing French names, frequently more than one name -- family and formal-- sometimes their professions, and then we're supposed to remember their costumes too? I think I'm as smart as the next person, and I struggled desperately. Eventually I did figure out all the important characters, but two men, Granger and Bouille, went off to fight a duel, and I never did figure out which was which, or exactly why. Never got as good a handle as I would like on Clemence or Hannibal, important supporting characters, either. And as for remembering, hundreds of pages later, that there was a mysterious purple pirate, well, really.

Nevertheless: Benjamin January (Janvier in the French) is a free man of color in Creole (that is, French and Spanish) New Orleans, just as carpet-bagging Americans are beginning to pour in and change everything, disregarding the powerful "Customs of the country," and the "black laws." New Orleans society is quite complicated at the time: next to the white Creoles stand their free cousins, half-brothers and sisters of color, locally graded by the fairness of their skins, and their percentages of black or white racial heritage: Hambly gives us all the local jargon covering these gradations, octaroon, quadroon and so forth, but, once again, I found it, though fascinating, a bit confusing, hard to remember, could have done with a table up front. At any rate, these cousins are also graded on their relationships to the city's most powerful families, and, "mais oui," their beauty. The most beautiful young women are "placees," kept women with their own houses, servants, slaves, carriages, jewels.

January is the son of a "placee," but he has only one white grandparent, and, as sometimes happens, he just popped out dark-skinned: that's an extremely heavy burden to carry at that time and place(not that it doesn't still weigh heavy now.) To find real freedom, he's spent 16 years in Paris, color-blind at the time, where he married and became a successful surgeon. But he's been widowed, and come back home, where he's too dark-skinned to practice medicine; luckily for him, he's a good enough musician and can support himself playing, and giving lessons. He's playing at this ball when a beautiful, pass-for-white placee is killed, and it doesn't take long before he realizes the local constabulary, as we've been long-since taught to expect in similar situations, would rather pin this murder on him than work too hard at it, or prosecute a white.

So, of course, January sets out to clear his name. The book does start slow, blame that brilliant but confusing masked ball, and takes some further time to get going, but eventually it rolls along like New Orleans' famous old river, the Mississippi. The New Orleans scenes continue to be riveting reading; the plantation scenes less successful, though still very informative. Hambly does emphasize the history over the mystery; that's solved off-the-cuff, late in the day.

How you feel about this book, therefore, will be largely determined by how well you like historical fiction; not all of us do. But it also closes with a bang, a very modern masquerade, as it happens. Worth picking up.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Patrick Burnett

Hard to Get Into, Hard to Put Down

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 January 2003

At first, it is difficult to understand what Barbara Hambly was attempting with "A Free Man of Color". Typically, when an author chooses an historical setting, he or she is doing one of two things, bringing light to the past through the artifice of fiction or revealing the present through the veil of the past. If Hambly was doing the former, she did a fine job of evoking old New Orleans.
The book takes place during a time when The City That Care Forgot was losing her tenuous grip on her past and becoming a unique product of American industrialism and European traditions. The Civil War was still thirty years in the future and New Orleans, for all the destruction and disease she had seen, for all the blood spilled in her streets still had an air of innocence. This is the story of Benjamin Janvier, recently widowed and returning to New Orleans after 16 years in Paris. This places Benjamin in the unique position of being able to contrast Paris, with it's lack of color distinctions, and New Orleans, with it's infamous "Code Noir" - the well-defined laws governing the behavior of "colored" people and their interaction with the French settlers, or Creoles. This also places the reader in the position of comparing the treatment of blacks in Janvier's day and their treatment today, which makes this something of the latter of the above kinds of novels. Is Hambly trying to tell an engaging and accurately detailed story set in the past? Or is she trying to poignantly underline current wrongs by speaking to us through the past? I'm not sure she is certain which story she wants to tell, which puts the reader in the awkward position of trying to figure it out for themselves.
Ben, a surgeon in Paris but, due to prejudice, unable to practice medicine in New Orleans, makes his living as a pianist. On his way to play at an octaroon ball, he runs into one of his former students, Mistress Trepagier, a creole widow who is sneaking into the ball in disguise, desperate to speak with her late husband's mistress. When the mistress is later strangled, Ben, due to his color, seems a likely scapegoat - the victim was a woman of color, the murderer a man of color. Let's hang him and get on with our lives. Thinking he will get no consideration from the police, Benjamin looks into the murder on his own. Hambly seems to have difficulty finding the rhythm in her narrative, like a drummer only slightly out of step with the rest of the marching band. The overall effect is nice, but you keep suspecting her hitching a step in order to catch up. Once she gets in step, however, the effect is mesmerising; the language becomes more fluid, the characters more honest to themselves. From an historical perspective, I fully expected to have Marie Laveau pop up, at least in mention, and I was not disappointed; the greater treat was a cameo by Madame LaLaurie, the famous New Orleans civil rights activist (I'm kidding, of course).
Although I had to struggle to get comfortable with this book, it won me over in the end. I am looking forward to the next story in the Benjamin Janvier chronicles.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

J. R. Perrett

A Free Man of Color

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 April 2010

An unusual subject for Barbara Hambly - at least for someone who had read only her Darwath and Sunwolf books before.
She seems to have a good grasp of the social and political divides of the time she has chosen, and I was intrigued to learn about a whole area of American culture / sub-culture of which I had known nothing before.
Well written and a gripping storyline.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Cassie

New to me!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 October 2010

This series by Barbara Hambly is new to me. As always she is a good read! The sense of time & place is excellently done & New Orleans is recreated in all its glory & squalor! Characterisation is also very good.

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