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A review by sadie_slater
Fever Season by Barbara Hambly
3.0
The second of Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries takes place in a shuttered, stifling New Orleans in the grip of a summer epidemic of yellow fever. Returning from a night shift tending fever victims, January is approached by a young woman who asks him to try to pass a message to her husband, who has been sold to a household where January is piano teacher to the daughters. Despite being certain the woman is a runaway slave, January agrees to help, and when she subsequently disappears he finds himself investigating not just her disappearance, but a series of disappearances of people of colour, both slaves and free.
Hambly does an excellent job of evoking the steamy, stinking plague-ridden city and the fearful atmosphere of its deserted streets. The mystery is capably plotted but mostly doesn't overshadow the careful historical detail about the precarity and constriction of the lives of people of colour, and particularly women of colour, in 1830s New Orleans, which makes it all the more nailbiting when Hambly does turn up the plotting and the tension. The ending, which is based on an actual reported case (though there are some questions about its veracity) combines both elements to produce a denouement I would have thought was perhaps overdoing the grimdark a bit if I hadn't then read the author's note explaining it was based on real events; as it was, it did remind me that a scene in one of Hambly's fantasy novels once disturbed me enough to keep me awake one night when I was in my teens. Despite the grimness, I did enjoy this a lot, and look forward to reading more of the series.
Hambly does an excellent job of evoking the steamy, stinking plague-ridden city and the fearful atmosphere of its deserted streets. The mystery is capably plotted but mostly doesn't overshadow the careful historical detail about the precarity and constriction of the lives of people of colour, and particularly women of colour, in 1830s New Orleans, which makes it all the more nailbiting when Hambly does turn up the plotting and the tension. The ending, which is based on an actual reported case (though there are some questions about its veracity) combines both elements to produce a denouement I would have thought was perhaps overdoing the grimdark a bit if I hadn't then read the author's note explaining it was based on real events; as it was, it did remind me that a scene in one of Hambly's fantasy novels once disturbed me enough to keep me awake one night when I was in my teens. Despite the grimness, I did enjoy this a lot, and look forward to reading more of the series.