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Days of the Dead
by Barbara Hambly

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From Booklist
     The seventh Benjamin January mystery begins not long after January's wedding; he and his wife, Rose, are en route to Mexico, where January's close friend is being held for a murder he says he did not commit. Can Benjamin clear him before he is executed? The story is solid and suspenseful, but we don't read the January mysteries entirely for their plots. Born at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the son of slaves on a cane plantation in Louisiana, educated in France, trained in medicine and music, an amateur detective, a free black man in a country still clutching to the awful notion of slavery, January is one of the genre's most unusual and interesting protagonists. Hambly, who has a master's degree in medieval history and whose knowledge of early-nineteenth-century America is clearly abundant, doesn't just write period mysteries; she engages in literary time travel. Few historical novels are as textured, as tactile, as the January mysteries. Considering the popularity of this series, demand for this title is guaranteed to be high. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
     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 of murder and blood vengeance.

Days of the Dead

     Mexico City in the autumn of 1835 is a lawless place, teeming with bandits and beggars. But an urgent letter from a desperate friend draws Benjamin January and his new bride Rose from New Orleans to this newly free province. Here they pray they’ll find Hannibal Sefton alive--and not hanging from the end of a rope. Sefton stands accused of murdering the only son of prominent landowner Don Prospero de Castellon. But when Benjamin and Rose arrive at Hacienda Mictlán, they encounter a murky tangle of family relations, and more than one suspect in young Fernando’s murder.

     While the evidence against Hannibal is damning, Benjamin is certain that his consumptive, peace-loving fellow musician isn’t capable of murder. Their only allies are the dead boy’s half sister, who happens to be Hannibal’s latest inamorata, and the mentally unstable Castellon himself, who awaits Mexico’s holy Days of the Dead, when he believes his slain son will himself reveal the identity of his killer.The search for the truth will lead Benjamin and Rose down a path that winds from the mazes of the capital’s back streets and barrios to the legendary pyramids of Mictlán and, finally, to a place where spirits walk and the dead cry out for justice. But before they can lay to rest the ghosts of the past, Benjamin and Rose will have to stop a flesh-and-blood murderer who’s determined to escape the day of reckoning and add Benjamin and Rose to the swelling ranks of the dead.

From the Back Cover
     "Hambly's Mexico is frighteningly alive."
--Publisher's Weekly

About the Author
     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. Barbara Hambly is the author of A Free Man of Color, Fever Season, Graveyard Dust, Wet Grave, Sold Down the River, and Die Upon a Kiss. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is at work on a novel about Mary Todd Lincoln, The Emancipator’s Wife.
 

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