When the body of visiting Englishman Henry Brooke, of dubious antecedents, is found floating in New Orleans' New Basin Canal, and the British Consul, Sir John Oldmixton, offers Benjamin January $100 plus expenses incurred to recover some "personal papers" that were in the possession of the deceased, Ben's first instinctive reaction is to have nothing to do with the matter. As a free black man in 1839 New Orleans, getting mixed up in the murky affairs of a white man and a Englishman at that, was not something he wanted to touch with a barge pole, Not to mention that he and his wife Rose, about to deliver their second child, had just spent three years digging themselves out of the financial disaster of the bank crash of 1836, and are about to reopen Rose's school.
But Ben finds himself drawn into this brangle in spite of his best efforts, when a young placeé, Jacquette Filoux, a friend of his sister Olympe, is arrested for Brooke's murder. The murder weapon, a so-called "muff pistol," reminds Ben forcibly of an unsolved murder in Paris nine years before, and another young woman, unjustly accused, who went to the guillotine when the one man who could have testified to her innocence disappeared.
When Ben begins to suspect that Henry Brooke could be that same man, then known as Gerry O'Dwyer, he realizes that the earlier murder could be connected to this second killing. And that many innocent lives could be lost, if he cannot unravel this mystery before time runs out.
Another meticulously researched and cleverly plotted historical mystery from Barbara Hambly.
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