Days of the Dead (Benjamin January, Band 7) - Softcover

Hambly, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553581627 ISBN 13: 9780553581621

Verlag: Bantam, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

The New York Times hails Barbara Hambly’s novels featuring Benjamin January as “masterly,” “ravishing,” and “haunting.” The Chicago Tribune crowns them “dazzling…January is a wonderfully rich and complex character.” Now the bestselling author returns with a story that leads January from the dangerously sensual milieu of New Orleans into a world seething with superstition and dark spirits, where one man’s freedom turns on a case of murder and blood vengeance.

Days of the Dead

Mexico City in the autumn of 1835 is a lawless place, teeming with bandits and beggars. But an urgent letter from a desperate friend draws Benjamin January and his new bride Rose from New Orleans to this newly free province. Here they pray they’ll find Hannibal Sefton alive—and not hanging from the end of a rope.Sefton stands accused of murdering the only son of prominent landowner Don Prospero de Castellon. But when Benjamin and Rose arrive at Hacienda Mictlán, they encounter a murky tangle of family relations, and more than one suspect in young Fernando’s murder.

While the evidence against Hannibal is damning, Benjamin is certain that his consumptive, peace-loving fellow musician isn’t capable of murder. Their only allies are the dead boy’s half sister, who happens to be Hannibal’s latest inamorata, and the mentally unstable Castellon himself, who awaits Mexico’s holy Days of the Dead, when he believes his slain son will himself reveal the identity of his killer.The search for the truth will lead Benjamin and Rose down a path that winds from the mazes of the capital’s back streets and barrios to the legendary pyramids of Mictlán and, finally, to a place where spirits walk and the dead cry out for justice. But before they can lay to rest the ghosts of the past, Benjamin and Rose will have to stop a flesh-and-blood murderer who’s determined to escape the day of reckoning and add Benjamin and Rose to the swelling ranks of the dead.

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Barbara Hambly is the author of The Emancipator’s Wife, a finalist for the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction. She is also the author of Fever Season, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and seven acclaimed historical novels.

Aus dem Klappentext

The New York Times hails Barbara Hambly s novels featuring Benjamin January as masterly, ravishing, and haunting. The Chicago Tribune crowns them dazzling January is a wonderfully rich and complex character. Now the bestselling author returns with a story that leads January from the dangerously sensual milieu of New Orleans into a world seething with superstition and dark spirits, where one man s freedom turns on a case of murder and blood vengeance.

Days of the Dead

Mexico City in the autumn of 1835 is a lawless place, teeming with bandits and beggars. But an urgent letter from a desperate friend draws Benjamin January and his new bride Rose from New Orleans to this newly free province. Here they pray they ll find Hannibal Sefton alive--and not hanging from the end of a rope.Sefton stands accused of murdering the only son of prominent landowner Don Prospero de Castellon. But when Benjamin and Rose arrive at Hacienda Mictlán, they encounter a murky tangle of family relations, and more than one suspect in young Fernando s murder.

While the evidence against Hannibal is damning, Benjamin is certain that his consumptive, peace-loving fellow musician isn t capable of murder. Their only allies are the dead boy s half sister, who happens to be Hannibal s latest inamorata, and the mentally unstable Castellon himself, who awaits Mexico s holy Days of the Dead, when he believes his slain son will himself reveal the identity of his killer.The search for the truth will lead Benjamin and Rose down a path that winds from the mazes of the capital s back streets and barrios to the legendary pyramids of Mictlán and, finally, to a place where spirits walk and the dead cry out for justice. But before they can lay to rest the ghosts of the past, Benjamin and Rose will have to stop a flesh-and-blood murderer who s determined to escape the day of reckoning and add Benjamin and Rose to the swelling ranks of the dead.


From the Hardcover edition.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Hacienda Mictlan
Outside the City of Mexico
September 16, 1835

Amicus Meus,

Enclosed with this missive you'll find a draft for what I hope is sufficient money to pay your passage here by the speediest available transport. My host at the moment is being so good as to hold the minions of Justice at bay, which is quite generous of him given that I am widely supposed to have murdered his only son. Were Don Prospero de Castell-n even marginally sane, I would probably already have been executed--the evidence is fairly damning. By remarks the Don has made, however, I have the uncomfortable conviction that after the first of November--the second at the latest--he will fall in with the popular view, not that I killed the fellow, but that I deserve to be punished for the deed. In company with most of the rest of the household, he believes that young Fernando will re-visit the house, along with various other deceased relatives, at that time, the only difference between his belief and that of his daughters and their families being that he thinks he will be able to ask the murdered man outright--and receive an answer in no uncertain terms--about what ought best to be done with yours truly.

The local constabulary is also in fairly steady attendance. If ever I have earned your regard or affection, please come and engage in a few sleuth-hound tactics. I am at a complete loss to imagine how anyone but myself could have made quietus for young Fernando--who certainly deserved what he got--and if you do not prove otherwise, I shall soon be forced to begin suspecting myself. Please come. I am in fairly desperate straits, though, as I said, I believe I shall be safe enough until the Days of the Dead.

Your friend,

Hannibal Sefton

Postscriptum: I don't know whether they still garrote heretics like myself here, or hygienically shoot them as they do in the countryside. You understand that I don't really like to ask.

Benjamin January folded up his friend's letter after its perhaps seventy-fifth reading in the three weeks since its arrival on the morning of his wedding, settled back against the jolting seat of the Vera Cruz diligencia, and wondered--again--if he was going to make it to Mexico City alive, and if he did whether Hannibal would still be alive when he got there.

At every inn en route, the innkeepers had whispered darkly about "bandits in the mountains," prompting the passengers of the diligencia to ride with rifles cradled in their arms and pistols at their belts: their fellow-passenger Mr. Dillard of Tennessee seemed to take January going armed as a personal affront. But then, Mr. Dillard had not ceased glaring at January since the coach had pulled out of the baking, vulture-haunted streets of Vera Cruz. "You're not gonna let nigras ride inside, are you?" Dillard had demanded of the driver.

"They paid for their ticket like everybody else," the driver had retorted in a nasal Yankee twang. "Something he's permitted to do in this country, which has had the courage to strike down the foul abomination of slavery . . . unlike some nations which purport to be free."

"Damn Whig abolitionist," had snarled Dillard.

"Godless fleshmongering Democrat," the driver had replied.

It had not been an auspicious beginning to a journey that rapidly got worse. In addition to the threat of bandits--which had not, in four days of travel, so far manifested itself--there was the more clearly present threat of the inns themselves, ancient, filthy structures of adobe-brick, primitive beyond belief and inhabited by nests of scorpions and centipedes as well as the more usual fauna of chickens, pigs, and village dogs. There was the food--mostly greasy tamales, inadequately cooked beans, and the national staple of tortillas, unleavened corncakes cooked on an open grill. Born in the slave-quarters of a cane plantation upriver from New Orleans, January had eaten worse, but not recently.

Most deadly of all, there was the Yankee coachman's driving, as he lashed his team of four skittery little mustangs at crazy speed over the high yellow passes of the Sierra Madre Orientale, causing the diligencia to sway and jolt and causing January to wonder if he shouldn't have damned his friend Hannibal to whatever penalty the government of New Spain--Pardon me, he corrected himself, MEXICO--thought fit to dole out, and stayed at home to enjoy the wonderful state of having actually, finally, against all odds, married Rose Vitrac.

A particularly savage rut hurled the coach nearly sideways and precipitated his new bride nearly into his lap. Covered with yellow dust, sweating in the crystalline heat of these parched gray peaks, her soft snuff-colored curls skinned back tight into unflattering braids for travel . . . it took everything in him not to seize her in his arms and cover her with kisses.

That would really give Mr. Dillard something to complain about, he thought. And it would shock the other passengers--two German merchants, their doddering Swiss valet, and a young priest--speechless. Instead, he remarked, "At least, at this rate, we'll get there soon, and learn what actually happened." He gestured with Hannibal's letter and tucked it back into his pocket.

Rose removed her spectacles, sought vainly for some portion of her clothing not thick with dust in order to clean the dusty lenses, then sighed and resignedly replaced them on her nose. "You don't think Hannibal actually did it, do you?"

This was a question they'd asked each other for three weeks now, when not occupied with the logistics of honeymoon copulation in a stateroom bunk barely the size of a particularly stingy coffin. (The Belle Marquise, out of New Orleans to Vera Cruz, transported pineapples, tobacco, and the insect life that invariably accompanied them, and the floor was not an option.) Mostly they wondered if their friend--of average height and skeletally thin from the ravages of consumption--could have physically accomplished murder.

And the answer, of course, was yes. Even were "young Fernando" as tall as January and, like January, built upon what English novelists liked to call Herculean lines, there was always poison, there were firearms, there was the possibility of a stiletto in the back in a darkened room. January and Rose had whiled away many hours evolving such hypothetical scenarios ("What if Fernando habitually wore a steel breastplate to bed?" "One can mix sulfate of mercury with candle-wax and make a poisoned candle that when burned will kill the person in the room. . . .") as they strolled the decks of the Belle Marquise, waiting for a northern wind to fill the sails for those last few maddening miles into Vera Cruz; and, latterly, as they'd had the marrow pounded out of their bones by the frantic pace of the diligencia over rutted mountain roads.

In the absence of the slightest information about the victim, the circumstances, or any conceivable motivation for the murder, it was as good a way as any to pass the time.

But that wasn't what Rose meant now, and January knew it.

His mind returned to the reeking heat and darkness of the waterfront at New Orleans, the tail-end of summer, 1832. Even at that hour of the night--and he'd heard the Cathedral clock strike three as he'd left the garaonniare above his mother's kitchen--there was activity along the levee, stevedores unloading bales from the big, ugly flat-sided steamboats, filthy ruffians in coarse calico shirts and heavy Conestoga boots driving pigs from the flatboats by the light of torches, whores in tawdry dresses plying their trade in the shadows. Music jingled from the saloons along Rue du Levee, where men gambled through the night, somewhere a slave gang hauling wood onto a boat wailed a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bantam
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0553581627
• ISBN 13: 9780553581621
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar