Rating: 
Summary: This was a refreshing type of book to read.
Review: I picked up this book at a little book store in Eagles Meere and the cover caught my eye. I really enjoyed this book because it was written about the 1830's and it was very interesting because I havent' read anything about that era in awhile. I like to read about that era and the way things were then. The fever must have been alful. The auther seems very educated in her field of history and sometimes I felt very uneducated about history to understand some of the lingo. There were some terms I still don't know about. (Where can I find out about those terms.) Anyway I really enjoyed this read. It was suspenseful, knowledgeabel and very well written.
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Summary: Another brilliant work in this historical mystery series
Review: In 1834, after being away from New Orleans for years, French-trained Doctor Benjamin January returns to provide help during a fatal cholera epidemic. Since he is a black man, Benjamin knows that his acceptance by the white community as a surgeon is,at best, tentative and probably will disappear once the current crisis passes. However, of more concern to Benjamin is a second epidemic in which free blacks are mysteriously disappearing, leaving the medical man to wonder if they are being sold on the slave market? Though he has absolutely no time to spare, Benjamin begins to investigate the second epidemic. However, even that is somewhat sidetracked by the plight of his friend Cora Chouteau, accused of murder and attempted murder of her master and his spouse. Benjamin wonders if Cora could have done the act or perhaps the wife, who had the motive, set a lowly slave up to take the fall. Talk about an overflowing plate, the brilliant and charming Benjamin needs thirty-six hours a day to complete half his tasks. Yet, in the hands of the talented Barbara Hambly, Benjamin comes across as an ambitious, caring individual who everyone should emulate. The story line of FEVER SEASON is a fast-paced, rising fever that will thrill readers of historical mysteries. The secondary players add a genuine feel to the tale, but it is the 1830's New Orleans social interactions that makes this book and its previous tale in the series (FREE MAN OF COLOR) some of the best fiction available for fans of the sub-genre. Harriet Klausner
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Summary: Heat and pestilence in New Orleans
Review: In the sequel to Free Man of Color, it is the summer of 1833, Ben January, a man of mixed blood making his living as a musician because he's not allowed to practice surgery in New Orleans, is working at a charity hospital battling the heat and the pestilence which is causing wealthy Orleanians to flee the city. January teaches music during the day and treats victims of Bronze John, the popular name for the deadly cholera epidemic, at night. The mother of two of his female students is considered a saint for working in the fetid hospitals. However, when a runaway slave seeks out January, he discovers that there are dark sides to Madame Lalaurie's personality. Hambly evokes the unrelenting heat, the fear of disease, and, most of all, the caste system which governed all facets of life.
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Summary: These books are about a way of life, as well as crimes.
Review: In writing about New Orleans in the 1830s I've tried to portray the unspoken social crimes that were going on -- slavery, the horrible position of women, the lack of justice for the poor and the helpless. Benjamin January is a man who has several strikes against him socially -- he's black in an era when American whites assumed that any black man was somebody's slave, and even the free colored were prejudiced against those darker than they. I'm embarassed to say that the era is a lot of fun to write in: January typically is trying to solve a crime when the whole landscape is littered with crimes that nobody sees or talks about. I hope the series does well -- FEVER SEASON is the second of at least eight -- because I've really come to love some of these people.
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Summary: Like the energizing bunny.........
Review: It just goes and goes....yet never does seem to get anywhere...the story of Benjamin January and all the lives he touches are just too difficult, and at times boring, to follow....I have read allot of mysteries, but did not find one person or thing about this book that kept me interested..... I think Hambly's constant descriptions of the air, the rats and roaches, the oppressive heat, the color of the faces of the people who are victims of 'Bronze John' etc. is too much. It is important to set the scene but to continue to bang away at the same drum repetitiously is TIRESOME. I was struck by the novel's cover and the many reviews it contained but now wonder if the those other reviewers were not also conned the way I was by the cover....somewhat hopeful, as I was, that it would bring some history to this fascinating city..... Finally, I don't care to read anymore of her books....I fear they will be full of the same tired rhetoric. Sad too because I think little is written save for Anne Rice's vampire charades on New Orleans.......two stars for effort are all it deserves....
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Summary: A letter from the author
Review: Since my college days (back in the late Mesozoic Era) I've wanted to do a mystery set in the antebellum South with a free black protagonist. Historical mysteries are mostly comedies of manners--investigations of the ins and outs of the society in which they take place--and the artificiality of that milieu fascinated me. I deliberately steered clear of the Civil War and the era immediately preceding it because a) a lot of other people have done it better than I could and b) because the issues, and the people, were very different even a generation earlier. It mokes it harder to research--very little is done about that changeover generation between Jeffersonian and Jacksonian America--but the more I study, the more fascinating stuff I find. It's a goldmine for a writer. One of the things I enjoy most about the Benjamin January series is the continuing cast of characters. Family and friends are a major subtheme of the books: you need your family. You need your friends. After Benjamin s wife dies he returns to New Orleans, a city in which he will automatically become a non-person and will be in periodic danger of enslavement, because his family is there and in his grief and his pain he cannot survive without them. This is not only an emotional truth in all times and places, but very typical of the society about which I'm writing. To the antebellum New Orleans Creoles, both white and black, family was everything. I must say I love writing Ben's mother. She's an absolutely horrible woman, snobbish and greedy and self-centered, but she's a wonderful mechanism to advance plots by giving the reader whole reams of Information in the form of spiteful gossip. In fact I love writing about most of those people--Ben's sisters, and his worthless white pal Hannibal, and Lieutenant Shaw. I'll occasionally use historical characters in the books, like Madame Lalaurie or John Davis, the man who owned the Orleans Ballroom, and I try to get those people as accurately as I can, from what I can learn of them. There was no lack of fascinating people running around New Orleans in that era. About some of them. like the voodoo queen Marie Laveau, it's almost impossible to find "hard" information--only rumors and traditions and tales that have been colored by the prejudice or political correctness of the tellers. I try, too, to portray what the city must have been like, what people must have been like. New Orleans fascinates me because there were literally four separate social systems--white Creoles, white Americans, mixed-race free colored, and black slaves--living in the same few square miles of territory and none of them dealing with the others unless absolutely necessary. The concept of solidarity between the free colored and the blacks was almost unheard-of: the free colored, for the most part, identified with the white Creoles, the people who had power and money. January is an interesting character to me precisely because he was raised with a French Creole outlook, because he has the outlook of an educated European. He's very much a man between two worlds, on outsider among his own people. For most of my life I've been a student of history, although I've had a fairly long career as a writer of sword-and-sorcery fantasy before I began writing historical mysteries. My degree is in Medieval History, something I've seldom used in any of my writing: basically what I learned was how to research, and how to set up a non-industrial society. From the time I was five I knew that I wanted to write, and I've tried to do at least a little of the things I write about: hand-to-hand combat, riding a horse, loading black powder weapons. dancing, wearing a corset. My love of history was one of the things that drew me to New Orleans for the first time, though I fell in love with the city--and with my husband, whom I met there--and ended up living in New Orleans half-time for nearly three years. I feel like I have so much more to learn. About myself I will just say that I was born In California, raised here, and currently live in Los Angeles with my husband, two dogs, two cats, and two lizards. Like Benjamin, I treasure my family and my friends. In the course of getting my degree in Medieval History I spent a year at the University of Bordeaux in the early seventies, and in connection with writing a couple of historical vampire thrillers I've traveled through Europe learning that there are no back-alleys in the old part of Vienna (oops, I guess I'll have to re-write that back-alley scene) and that the sunlight in Istanbul is not like light anywhere else that I've seen. My husband, who is a science fiction writer, and I go back to New Orleans a few, times a year. Even in the eighteenth century it was remarked on that once someone had lived there, the city would draw them back. I hope to go on writing about that town for a very long time.
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Summary: A Chilling Account from 1833 New Orleans.
Review: 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 slave to her slave lover in another household and from this seemingly innocuous act, he is embroiled into a maelstrom of of lies, greed, torture and murder. As we read we see life as it was in 1833 New Orleans. We also see how black people had no choice or rights in that city, even if they were "free" and not slaves. It's scary to see what can be overlooked and glossed over for cultural or politically reasons. This is an awesome historical mystery, and much more fast-moving and exciting than the first one was.
Rating:
Summary: A Chilling Account from 1833 New Orleans.
Review: 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 slave to her slave lover in another household and from this seemingly innocuous act, he is embroiled into a maelstrom of of lies, greed, torture and murder. As we read we see life as it was in 1833 New Orleans. We also see how black people had no choice or rights in that city, even if they were "free" and not slaves. It's scary to see what can be overlooked and glossed over for cultural or politically reasons. This is an awesome historical mystery, and much more fast-moving and exciting than the first one was.
Rating:
Summary: A Chilling Account from 1833 New Orleans.
Review: 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 slave to her slave lover in another household and from this seemingly innocuous act, he is embroiled into a maelstrom of of lies, greed, torture and murder. As we read we see life as it was in 1833 New Orleans. We also see how black people had no choice or rights in that city, even if they were "free" and not slaves. It's scary to see what can be overlooked and glossed over for cultural or politically reasons. This is an awesome historical mystery, and much more fast-moving and exciting than the first one was.
Rating:
Summary: A good read,but not the equal of its prequel.
Review: This is a very well crafted book. The words and sentences flow beautifully. I loved the previous book, and was ready to love this one also. Fever Season was slightly disappointing. This book isn't as rich in detail as the first book. Ms. Hambly does not spend the time describing the societies and people, or developing her main characters, that she did in the first novel. I missed this. She does describes clothes and architecture vividly. These aren't merely a cosmetic detail, but are crucial parts of novel. Its a pity that this book doesn't come in a copiusly illustrated edition. This is a very good read, but "Free Man of Color" is much better. I strongly recommend reading both books, in order.
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