Fever Season

"Superb. Exciting and compelling."—King Features Syndicate "Stunning. From the highborn Creoles to the uncivilized Americans, Hambly knows all their secrets and brings them all to life."— The New York Times Book Review " Fever Season reaffirms Hambly's claim to be a notable writer of mystery fiction."— Washington Times Informationen zum Autor Barbara Hambly Klappentext 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. Leseprobe In fever season, traffic in the streets was thin. Those who could afford to do so had left New Orleans with the ending of Lent; those who could not had all through the long summer hurried about their business as if Bronze John, as they called the sickness, were a creditor one could avoid if one kept off the streets. Midday, the molten September heat raised steam from the water in the French town's cypress-lined gutters and the rain puddles in the soupy streets. Mephitic light filtered through clouds of steamboat soot from the levees and gave the town the look of a grimy but inexplicably pastel-walled hell. Only those whose errands were pressing walked the streets then. So it took no great cleverness on Benjamin January's part to realize that he was being followed. Charity Hospital, where he'd spent the night and all the morning among the dying, lay on the uptown side of Canal Street, the American side. It was against January's nature to spend more time on that side of town than was absolutely necessary, to say nothing of the fact that Americans seemed to regard all free persons of color as potential slaves, money on the hoof going to waste that could be going into their pockets in the big markets along Baronne and Levee Streets. Americans made no distinction, as the French were careful to do, between African blacks--be they slaves or freedmen--and the free persons of color whose parents had been both colored and white. Not, January reflected wryly, that it made a great deal of difference in his case. But even in fever season, when men and women, black and white and colored, were only hands to hold off Bronze John from one another--to carry water and vinegar and saline draughts, to fan away the humming swarms of mosquitoes and flies--he felt uneasy uptown. Maybe that was why he realized so quickly that someone was dogging his steps. His head ached from twenty-four hours without sleep. His senses felt dulled, as if someone had carefully stuffed his skull with dirty lint soaked in the stinking fluids of the dying; his very bones weighed him down. His last patient that day had been a nine-year-old girl who'd walked the twelve streets to the hospital from the levee where she'd been selling oranges. Her mama, she said in English, before delirium claimed her, would whale her for not staying on to finish the day. The child had died before she could tell anyone who her mama was or where that lady could be found. As of that morning, no newspaper in the town had yet admitted that there was an epide...

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Barbara Hambly
• Verlag: Bantam Books USA
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 04.05.1999
• EAN: 9780553575279
• ISBN: 978-0-553-57527-9
• Seiten: 395
• Abmessung: 107 mm x 175 mm x 30 mm
• Serien: Benjamin January; Benjamin January
• Thema: Belletristik > Erzählende Literatur