I am behind on the Benjamin January series of historical mysteries on purpose, because I like to save them up for when I have extended time to read and appreciate.
Cold Bayou by Barbara Hambly (2018) is sixteenth in the series, and I would not recommend starting here, as there are a lot of returning characters with complex relationships. Set in 1839 in southern Louisiana, the free man of color Ben, his wife Rose, his mother, his sister Dominique and her daughter, and his close friend Hannibal Sefton travel via steamboat to an isolated plantation, Cold Bayou, for a wedding.
As well as the inhabitants of the plantation (enslaved people and the mixed-race overseer and his wife), the sprawling cast includes an assortment of other family related by blood or otherwise through the complex French-Creole system of interracial relationships called plaçage or mariages de la main gauche. These involved White men contracting with mistresses of color while, often, married to White women for reasons of money or control over land rather than romance. The resulting complexities are a constant theme in this series, as Ben and his sister Olympe were freed from slavery in childhood when their mother was purchased and freed to be a placée; meanwhile, his half-sister Dominique is currently a placée, and on good terms with her partner Henri’s wife, Chloe, who later has a larger role in the mystery plot.
Veryl St.-Chinian, one of two members of a family with control over a vast quantity of property, is 67 years old and has decided to marry 18 year old Ellie Trask, an illiterate Irish girl whose past is revealed to be socially dubious. Even before Ellie’s rough-hewn uncle shows up with a squad of violent bravos, tempers are fraught and no-one thinks the marriage is a good idea, because of the vast family voting power it would give Ellie. Complicating matters is the inevitable murder and also a storm that floods the plantation and prevents most outside assistance for an extended period.
Hambly is one of my autobuy authors and I greatly enjoyed revisiting familiar characters as well as seeing them grapple with mystery tropes such as “detective is incapacitated and must rely on others for information” and “isolated assortment of plausible murder suspects.” She’s great at successively amping up the danger with plot twists that fractal out to the rest of the story, and though justice is always achieved in the end (as is required for the Mystery genre), the historical circumstances of these books can result in justice for some and not others. I highly recommend this series if you like mystery that successfully dramatizes complex social history.
