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The Nubian's Curse - Barbara Hambly (Ben January #20)
(I'm not 100% on board with the title, I think, but you do you, Hambly. It's plot-relevant, anyway.)
So - new Ben January! Always delightful to see everyone again! I can't believe I've been reading this series since the most recent book was book EIGHT, or possibly nine.
I'm not sure if it was just me or if this book had a ludicrously complicated and hard to follow plot, but considering that there's most of a chapter near the climax that consists of Ben and another character walking somewhere while explaining the plot to each other, I don't think it was just me.
This is yet another book in the series that has a lot of flashbacks to Paris. One of Ben's old Paris friends, an opera singer who reinvented herself as a rich man's widow, shows up in New Orleans with two wealthy young American heiresses who she is accompanying to the home of a slave dealer who Ben met briefly in Paris and who absconded with yet another young heiress (and former friend of Ben's) who was forced to marry him, also bringing along her African-Parisian lover, who became enslaved in America. Ben's Paris opera diva friend wants him to help her sort it out, and resolve a murder from 15 years earlier that this entire group of people were involved with. There's also a side plot involving Ben's niece Zizi-Marie and the three different suitors she's torn between: a nice but poor himbo she's engaged to marry in about two weeks, a wealthy planter's son who wants to make her his mistress, and the planter's son's dashing valet who is the one of the three she's actually in love with.
Oh yeah, there's also a maybe-haunted house in the Paris flashbacks and a maybe-haunted house in the modern day and a rash of murders in the modern day that resemble the maybe-ghost killing in the Paris flashbacks.
So basically there is a LOT going on and I feel like one of the reasons why I kept stalling out on this book is because there were at least three of everything and it was hard to keep track. THREE heiresses (I quickly gave up on trying to keep the two young American girls straight), and THREE suitors for Zizi-Marie and at least two suitors per heiress and at least two plot-relevant relatives per heiress and two different timelines that frequently cut back and forth between each other ...
I'm not saying it's a bad book, just that it turned out to be mentally taxing trying to keep track of everything going on in the plot!
That being said, with about 20 suspects (and possible ghosts) the murders were legitimately very mysterious and I had absolutely NO idea what was going on with that in either timeline. One reason why there were so many characters was that a lot of the different plotlines and subplots echoed each other: Ben's Parisian friend with her invented backstory of being minor Italian nobility + the fake Hungarian prince scamming the two heiresses + Zizi-Marie's con-artist boyfriend getting close to her to steal Ben and Rose's valuables. The mirroring was particularly themed around how little actual power to determine the course of their lives women had in the 1830s, which was also at the intersection of class, race, and money. (But not always as you'd expect; Zizi-Marie's choice between love and poverty is a miserable one, but she ends up with more choice than wealthy white Belle, who is raped at sixteen and pressured into a marriage to her father's wealthy business partner and in love with someone she can't legally marry in America.)
I am amused that Hambly has, in this book, all of a sudden made police jurisdiction a thing, because Shaw having jurisdiction over the location where the modern murders occur would probably have made the last third of the book not really happen or at least it would have been a lot shorter, and instead he's conveniently unable to do much, as opposed to being apparently the only detective in lower Louisiana in some of the previous books.
This wasn't really a favorite, especially after Death and Hard Cider was so completely relevant to my id, but I enjoyed it. Surprisingly happy romantic endings all around, with a maybe somewhat contrived wrap-up for Zizi-Marie's plotline when she realizes that she actually does love her himbo fiancé Ti-Gall after he heroes it up saving her from baddies, and Belle and her long-separated African lover Arithmus running off to Egypt together. I can't help feeling like the most recent couple of books in the series have started to have a tying-up-loose-ends sense to them.
So - new Ben January! Always delightful to see everyone again! I can't believe I've been reading this series since the most recent book was book EIGHT, or possibly nine.
I'm not sure if it was just me or if this book had a ludicrously complicated and hard to follow plot, but considering that there's most of a chapter near the climax that consists of Ben and another character walking somewhere while explaining the plot to each other, I don't think it was just me.
This is yet another book in the series that has a lot of flashbacks to Paris. One of Ben's old Paris friends, an opera singer who reinvented herself as a rich man's widow, shows up in New Orleans with two wealthy young American heiresses who she is accompanying to the home of a slave dealer who Ben met briefly in Paris and who absconded with yet another young heiress (and former friend of Ben's) who was forced to marry him, also bringing along her African-Parisian lover, who became enslaved in America. Ben's Paris opera diva friend wants him to help her sort it out, and resolve a murder from 15 years earlier that this entire group of people were involved with. There's also a side plot involving Ben's niece Zizi-Marie and the three different suitors she's torn between: a nice but poor himbo she's engaged to marry in about two weeks, a wealthy planter's son who wants to make her his mistress, and the planter's son's dashing valet who is the one of the three she's actually in love with.
Oh yeah, there's also a maybe-haunted house in the Paris flashbacks and a maybe-haunted house in the modern day and a rash of murders in the modern day that resemble the maybe-ghost killing in the Paris flashbacks.
So basically there is a LOT going on and I feel like one of the reasons why I kept stalling out on this book is because there were at least three of everything and it was hard to keep track. THREE heiresses (I quickly gave up on trying to keep the two young American girls straight), and THREE suitors for Zizi-Marie and at least two suitors per heiress and at least two plot-relevant relatives per heiress and two different timelines that frequently cut back and forth between each other ...
I'm not saying it's a bad book, just that it turned out to be mentally taxing trying to keep track of everything going on in the plot!
That being said, with about 20 suspects (and possible ghosts) the murders were legitimately very mysterious and I had absolutely NO idea what was going on with that in either timeline. One reason why there were so many characters was that a lot of the different plotlines and subplots echoed each other: Ben's Parisian friend with her invented backstory of being minor Italian nobility + the fake Hungarian prince scamming the two heiresses + Zizi-Marie's con-artist boyfriend getting close to her to steal Ben and Rose's valuables. The mirroring was particularly themed around how little actual power to determine the course of their lives women had in the 1830s, which was also at the intersection of class, race, and money. (But not always as you'd expect; Zizi-Marie's choice between love and poverty is a miserable one, but she ends up with more choice than wealthy white Belle, who is raped at sixteen and pressured into a marriage to her father's wealthy business partner and in love with someone she can't legally marry in America.)
I am amused that Hambly has, in this book, all of a sudden made police jurisdiction a thing, because Shaw having jurisdiction over the location where the modern murders occur would probably have made the last third of the book not really happen or at least it would have been a lot shorter, and instead he's conveniently unable to do much, as opposed to being apparently the only detective in lower Louisiana in some of the previous books.
This wasn't really a favorite, especially after Death and Hard Cider was so completely relevant to my id, but I enjoyed it. Surprisingly happy romantic endings all around, with a maybe somewhat contrived wrap-up for Zizi-Marie's plotline when she realizes that she actually does love her himbo fiancé Ti-Gall after he heroes it up saving her from baddies, and Belle and her long-separated African lover Arithmus running off to Egypt together. I can't help feeling like the most recent couple of books in the series have started to have a tying-up-loose-ends sense to them.
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I am amused that I have only ever ONCE fingered whodunnit in this series, and it was the one with Madame Lalaurie because that's semi-local history for me. XD
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