The New York Times hails Barbara Hambly’s novels featuring Benjamin January as “masterly,” “ravishing,” and “haunting.” The Chicago Tribune crowns them “dazzling…January is a wonderfully rich and complex character.” Now the bestselling author returns with a story that leads January from the dangerously sensual milieu of New Orleans into a world seething with superstition and dark spirits, where one man’s freedom turns on a case...

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 the field hand, cutting cane until his bones ache and his...

"Benjamin January is called up to Vicksburg, deep in cotton-plantation country, to help a wounded 'conductor' of the Underground Railroad, the secret network of safe-houses that guide escaping slaves to freedom. When the chief 'conductor' of the 'station' is found murdered, Jubal Cain, the coordinator of the whole Railroad system in Mississippi, is accused of the crime. Since Cain can't expose the nature of his involvement in the railroad, January...

When a raddled bag lady is found slashed to death in New Orleans, few people care, except for Benjamin January, a musician and teacher who remembers the woman from her glory days as the jeweled mistress of a corsair, and vows to find her killer and bring him to justice.

"New Orleans, 1840. Freshly home from a dangerous journey, the last thing Benjamin January wants to do is leave his wife and young sons again. But when old friends Henri and Chloe Viellard ask for his help tracking down a missing girl in distant New York, he can't say no. Three weeks ago, seventeen-year-old Eve Russell boarded a steam-boat and never got off it. Mrs Russell is adamant Eve's been kidnapped, but how could someone remove a teenager from...