Benjamin January Box Set Books 14-16 - Barbara Hambly Audiobook

Written by Barbara Hambly
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 32 Kbps
Unabridged

14 Drinking Gourd

Benjamin January must uncover a killer to protect a secret . . .”
Benjamin January is called up to Vicksburg, deep in cotton-plantation country, to help a wounded conductor of the Underground Railroad the secret network of safe-houses that guide escaping slaves to freedom. When the chief conductor of the station is found murdered, Jubal Cain the coordinator of the whole Railroad system in Mississippi is accused of the crime. Since Cain can t expose the nature of his involvement in the railroad, January has to step in and find the true killer, before their covers are blown.
As January probes into the murky labyrinth of slaves, slave-holders, the fugitives who follow the drinking gourd north to freedom and those who help them on their way, he discovers that there is more to the situation than meets the eye, and that sometimes there are no easy answers.

15 Murder in July

When British spymaster Sir John Oldmixton offers Benjamin January a hundred dollars to find the murderer of an Englishman whose body has been found floating in the New Basin Canal, Benjamin turns him down immediately. As a free man of colour in New Orleans in the sweltering July of 1839, he knows this is not something he should get mixed up in.
But when clues to the dead man’s identity link the death to another murder, in another July in January’s past, he is reluctantly drawn into the investigation. Nine years ago in Paris he failed to catch a killer - with tragic consequences. Now in New Orleans he must unravel the earlier murder, the one that took place during the great revolt against the Bourbon kings, to solve the second killing. At stake is not merely a hundred dollars, but hidden treasure, the fate of an innocent woman - and the lives of January’s wife, son and unborn child

16 Cold Bayou

Don’t go to Cold Bayou, brother … Nuthin’ good waiting for you there.”

New Orleans, 1839. Despite his misgivings, Benjamin January has agreed to play the piano at the wedding of wealthy French Creole landowner Veryl St-Chinian. All is not well, for the marriage of 67-year-old, profoundly infatuated Uncle Veryl to an 18-year-old Irish tavern-slut spells potential disaster for everyone in the inter-married Viellard and St-Chinian clans. But the old man is determined to marry Miss Ellie Trask, and nothing will stand in his way.

On the isolated plantation of Cold Bayou where the ceremony is to take place, tension is rife even before the body is discovered in the woods behind the dower house, its throat cut. A yet more disturbing turn of events sees January himself accused of the crime.