β Scribed by Barbara Hambly
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
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....
From the Paperback edition.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
John Guareβs new play is astonishing, raucous and panoramic. *A Free Man of Color* is set in boisterous New Orleans prior to the historic Louisiana Purchase. Before law and order took hold, and class, racial and political lines were drawn, New Orleans was a carnival of beautiful women, flowing wine
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
### Amazon.com Review In Barbara Hambly's rich and poignant thriller, it's 1833 and Ben January--a man of mixed blood making his living as a musician because he's not allowed to practice surgery--is back home in New Orleans after years of freedom in Paris. Trying to walk a caste line more complicat
From Library Journal With this historical novel, Hambly departs from her usual work in the sf/fantasy genre (e.g., Traveling with the Dead, LJ 8/95). Her new work is set in 19th-century Louisiana Creole society, where it was customary for a man to have a wife and also to keep a mistress in her own
It was the revolutionary act of loving a white boy that nearly cost him his life. It was the revolutionary act of his government, that gave it back to him. Betraying his Master in the big house, had gotten slave Ted beaten and tossed back into the fields. A fellow slave heals him, loves him, and