Just Finished Reading... House Of The Patriarch by Barbara Hambly, Severn House 2020. Benjamin January Series, # 18

This novel is part of a series which began some years ago with A Free Man Of Color. It is, in fact, the eighteenth of a series of historical crime fiction novels by an author who has also done fantasy and horror fiction. 

Benjamin January is an African American surgeon and musician living in New Orleans in the 1830s and 1840s. He was born into slavery, but given an education courtesy of his mother’s protector. Due to his colour, he is mostly a musician, playing the piano and giving music lessons to make a living. But he is also a very good private detective, who is hired to solve mysteries. In New Orleans his two best friends, Abishag Shaw and Hannibal Sefton, are both white, which comes in handy when he needs to travel without being kidnapped by slavers. Shaw is a policeman, Hannibal an Irish violinist who often plays with Benjamin in orchestras. In this novel, Hannibal is sick and Abishag Shaw doesn’t appear at all. 

This novel is set soon after the events of Lady Of Perdition, in which he travelled to Texas to help a former piano student in big trouble. This time, Benjamin January travels to New York with his sister’s protector, Henri Viellard, and his wife Chloe, who had introduced him to an English couple, the Russells, whose daughter has disappeared, possibly joined a cult somewhere outside New York City.

The Patriarch of the title, the Reverend Broadax, runs a farming community which also gathers to speak to beloved dead, through a woman called the Shining Herald. Is it the real thing or is Broadax just another con artist who has persuaded people to sign over their farms to him? And where is young Eve Russell? 

Fortunately he has some help from a self-confessed humbug, one P.T Barnum, who is at the start of his con artist career, well before his circus was a thing...

In an earlier novel, Good Man Friday, January had help from another historical person, Edgar Allan Poe, who was in Washington D.C to look for work. (It was implied that January inspired him to create his detective C.Auguste Dupin!) The author does usually set her novels at a time when a real historical event was happening and slide in some real people.

 I have to admit, I enjoyed this particular character, who is shown as a likeable rogue. 

It’s remarkable how, after eighteen books, Barbara Hambly’s series is still going strong. Benjamin January is still shown as a decent human being, with compassion and kindness, who is able to solve mysteries despite the problems that having a black skin in this time and place brings, knowing that if he isn’t very, very careful, he could easily end up sold back into slavery. 

I bought this book in Kindle, spending some of an Amazon gift card given to me at Christmas. It was well worth spending half of my gift card!