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TBR Wednesday: Fever Season by Barbara Hambly
  | Fever Season Barbara Hambly Mystery 1998 Rating: B-
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Fever Season is the second book in the Benjamin January historical mystery series set in 1830's New Orleans. The first is A Free Man of Color. The series explores the rights and legal deprivations of the colored, as it was then proudly referred to to distinguish it from the slave, community. Benjamin was born a slave, but when he was young his mother took on a wealthy white protector and managed to extract them from slavery. Benjamin's life considerably improved and he was given substantial training in both music and medicine, but his very dark skin keeps him from the gentility many in the free community insist they have. With the arrival of the Americans, who don't differentiate in the French way between slave and free, in New Orleans, his continued freedom becomes a far more tenuous thing.
In Fever Season, Benjamin, trained in Paris as a surgeon, is helping to fight the yellow fever epidemic in the Charity Hospital. His nights are horrific, full of pestilence, filth, and death. The city is burning, both with fever and with the summer's heat when he is confronted by a girl, obviously a runaway slave who needs a favor done. Her lover has been sold away and Benjamin tutors music for the Lalaurie household where he now serves. Will Benjamin give him a message for her. This girl, Cora, soon makes a strange but helpful benefactor in Madame Lalaurie who gives her some money to get somewhere safe, but before she can use it, she goes missing. Night after night, as the people of the city die, Benjamin encounters others searching for free people of color who have seemingly disappeared. The epidemic is brutal, but soon Benjamin begins to suspect something more sinister than pestilence is going on.
Barbara Hambly takes an interesting period in history and fully fleshes it out. This novel is much more about the free colored man's reality in the deep South than it is about a specific disappearance. Her prose is evocative, she paints a picture of the city with the heat and the sickness so well you swelter and ail yourself. Occasionally I got rather tired of sweltering and being repulsed at all of the grim, smelly, maggot infested putrescence, but her words certainly produced a reaction. Benjamin, though a male character, is a vulnerable one. His skin and his social position are at odds with his intelligence and training, and he rebells against this unfairness repeatedly in a way that any reader, male or female, who has ever felt vulnerable can relate to.
Hambly does a good job with her other characters as well. Benjamin's family is a mishmash of haughty and down-to-earth. His friends, white, black, or colored, tend to have suffered illness or injustice. Benjamin begins a tentative friendship with an intelligent, overeducated, socially awkward free woman of color that looks like might progress to something more romantic in future books. In Fever Season, Hambly also uses several historical personage, including society queen Madame Delphine Lalaurie and voodooienne queen, Marie Laveau, to move her plot along. These were fascinating people, although readers who are familiar with the New Orleans Lalaurie scandal may have a clue to the book's eventual denouement.
Despite all the book has going for it in setting and characterization, it does have certain slog-through moments. Honestly, it took me reading almost to the halfway mark before I finally figured out just what was going on. There is a lot going on, and the mystery isn't solved quickly since any forensic evidence there can't be examined by modern techniques. Benjamin sleuths, but both the lack of evidence and his powerless social standing prevent him from getting to the truth in any sort of timely manner.
Ultimately I enjoyed Fever Season, and I will continue on with the next book in the series, Graveyard Dust. However, this book isn't a light or quick read, so I'd advise reading it when you have some time to spend and fully concentrate on the significant historical detail and social commentary Hambly offers her reader.