Books : Fever Season (Benjamin January, Book 2)
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In association with Amazon.com
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by: Barbara Hambly
Amazon.com's Price: $7.99 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780553575279
ISBN: 0553575279
Label: Bantam
Manufacturer: Bantam
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 416
Publication Date: May 04, 1999
Publisher: Bantam
Release Date: May 04, 1999
Sales Rank: 429214
Studio: Bantam
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Benjamin January made his debut in bestselling author Barbara Hambly's A Free Man of Color, a haunting mélange of history and mystery. Now he returns in another novel of greed, madness, and murder amid the dark shadows and dazzling society of old New Orleans, named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.
The summer of 1833 has been one of brazen heat and brutal pestilence, as the city is stalked by Bronze John—the popular name for the deadly yellow fever epidemic that tests the healing skills of doctor and voodoo alike. Even as Benjamin January tends the dying at Charity Hospital during the steaming nights, he continues his work as a music teacher during the day.
When he is asked to pass a message from a runaway slave to the servant of one of his students, January finds himself swept into a tempest of lies, greed, and murder that rivals the storms battering New Orleans. And to find the truth he must risk his freedom...and his very life.
Amazon.com Review:
In New Orleans in 1833, appearance is everything for people of color. 'His own coat and waistcoat ... were one badge of his freedom,' Barbara Hambly writes about Ben January, a surgeon and teacher of music. 'Even more than the papers the law demanded he carry--and as much as the well-bred French his tutors and his mother had hammered into him as a child--they said, This is a free man of color, not somebody's property to be bought and sold.' When the veteran science fiction writer Hambly first introduced January, in the stunning and heartbreaking A Free Man of Color, the only problem seemed to be that the book told us so much about a vanished world that it couldn't possibly support a sequel. Fortunately, Hambly has found a way to make it work by putting January into a real crime, the case of a woman named Delphine Lalaurie whose savagery toward her slaves managed to shock even her contemporaries. 'She was a tall woman, imperially straight; and though nearly every Creole woman of her age had surrendered to rich food and embonpoint, she retained the slim figure of a girl,' Hambly writes of the majestic Delphine on her first meeting with January. She has come to the reeking, corpse-clogged hospital where January is working during a cholera epidemic to warn him about helping a runaway slave girl accused of murder. Ignoring that warning puts January into a situation so full of danger to himself and others that in lesser hands it could easily have become overwrought. Hambly, however, knows better than anyone that readers connect to characters rooted in honesty, regardless of how alien their environment may seem to us. --Dick Adler
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Awsome service
Fever Season - the book arrived in a very timely manner & in the condition described. I would buy from the seller again.
Rating:  - Fever Season
The book was in very good condition. The price was great. Only semi-complaint, it took longer than usual for the book to arrive.
Rating: - --Read a FREE MAN OF COLOR first--
FEVER SEASON is the second book in the Benjamin January mystery series. The first book is called A FREE MAN OF COLOR and I believe that this book is much easier to understand and enjoy if it's read after the primary story.
Ben is a black man, who had been freed from slavery and left New Orleans, went to France where he was educated as a doctor and returned to New Orleans. The year is 1833 and Ben has to be very careful, people are dying of Bronze John which is the name for cholera. ... Read More
Rating: - Murder in Historical New Orleans
It's the summer of 1833 and the muddy, cobbledstone streets of New Orleans reek with the stench of death. The city is under siege by an invisible killer that is claiming hundreds of lives. Knowing no difference between class or color, yellow fever is striking at will. From the lavish mansions of the wealthy landowners to the battered slave quarters, no one is safe. Nothing seems to be able to keep the illness at bay, not the skills of the conventional doctors or the mysterious healing powers ... Read More
Rating: - A Chilling Account from 1833 New Orleans.
This book is spare as well as chilling. Ms. Hambly borrows from true historical situations to write this story about her "freed coloured" hero, Benjamin January. This book opens during a massive "fever" (Bronze John) outbreak in New Orleans in the summer. Benjamin is working nights at a hospital trying to help people stricken with the sickness. He is a trained doctor, although he is not allowed to practice at any other time because he is "coloured". He is asked to pass a message from a runaway ... Read More
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