It’s set in New Orleans in the 1830s and 40s. Sometimes there is travel elsewhere. Benjamin January is an African American former slave, who is now making most of his living as a musician and piano teacher, though he is also qualified as a surgeon, thanks to his mother Livia’s late lover, who bought her and her children out of slavery and set her up as a placee(coloured mistress).
Benjamin is also a sleuth. Usually, it’s because someone he cares about has been accused of murder. Sometimes he is actually commissioned and paid. He works with his two closest friends, both white, to solve each mystery. One of them is Abishag Shaw, a police officer - who commissions him, in one novel, The Shirt On His Back, to find out who murdered his brother. His other close friend is fellow musician Hannibal Sefton, an Anglo Irishman, who is poor as dirt now, and very sick, but who carries a Stradivarius violin. Hannibal often poses as his master when they need to travel because it will be safer for Benjamin to avoid being kidnapped and sold back into slavery if he is apparently a slave.
His wife, Rose, is an intellectual who runs a girls’ school and translates Ancient Greek and Latin text.
I really enjoy this series. It’s not only the history but the culture that intrigues me. The author really knows her history but also things such as the food - my mouth waters every time Benjamin stops off with a friend on the street to discuss the case while enjoying coffee and delicious pastries. Also, when one of his family is cooking. Yum!
She also, quite often, centres a story around a historical event, or includes a historical figure. In the course of the series, he meets pre-circus Barnum, a charming rogue, and Edgar Allan Poe, when Benjamin is in Washington searching for a missing man. Both of these help him.
If you haven’t read any of these stories yet, what are you waiting for?
The first novel in the series is A Free Man Of Color.
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