WET GRAVE
Barbara Hambly
Bantam
Historical Mystery
ISBN: 0553109359

"...(T)hey come here seeking their fortunes, but all they find is a wet grave."

The speaker is Benjamin January, a freeman of color living in New Orleans in the 1830s. The "they" referred to are white men, and the "here" is the Crescent City. Although January is a fictitious creation, his words, spoken in Barbara Hambly's WET GRAVE, are as true now as they were in the fictitious but historical world that January inhabits.

It is not unusual to find such accuracy in Hambly's historical mystery novels. WET GRAVE, the sixth of her books to chronicle the life and times of January, contains the same elements that made its five predecessors instant classics and forever memorable: sympathetic characters, complex and interesting plots, and perhaps most significantly, a historical accuracy, borne of months of research, interwoven within the descriptions of the background upon which the characters function.

The background, as WET GRAVE opens, concerns two murders. The death by foul play of Guifford Avacet, a wealthy plantation owner, is cause for concern; the death of an alcoholic prostitute of color, the former consort of a pirate, is not felt to be worth the time of even a preemptory investigation. January, whose contact with the woman had been remote and minimal, is nonetheless compelled to investigate the manner and motive of her slaying. As a freeman of color and a second-class citizen (in contrast to a slave, who would, indeed, have no standing at all) his options are limited. When January's investigation by happenstance uncovers a gun-smuggling operation, it results in the death of someone close to him. He now seeks not only justice on two fronts, but also vengeance. January soon finds that his impromptu --- and illegal --- investigation into the death of Avacet intersects with that of his sometimes ally, Lieutenant Shaw of the New Orleans police, and that the two murders are part of a larger plot that will lead to death and destruction on the plantations in the marshes and bayous downriver from New Orleans.

Hambly, in WET GRAVE, continues her fine work of documenting, down to the last nuance, the culture, mores, people, and history of New Orleans in the 1830s. Hambly's strong suits are the subtlety of her descriptions and her ability to infuse the lives and circumstances of her characters with a nobility in the face of difficult and terrible situations. If the conclusion of WET GRAVE comes in a bit too neat of a package, it is one that the faithful readers of this series will nonetheless applaud. There is the promise of more novels featuring January; given his dramatic change of life and circumstance at the conclusion of WET GRAVE, it will be interesting to see how these impact on events in future novels. For the present, however, the six novels comprising the Benjamin January series stand alone, and without peer, in the genre of historical mysteries.

   --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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