Wet Grave has not yet been reviewed at ParaNormalRomance Reviews.
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"Insightful historical mystery"
Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted June 10, 2002 on The Best Reviews
SummaryIn such stunning novels of crime and character as Die Upon
a Kiss, Sold Down the River, and A Free Man of Color,
Benjamin January tracked down killers through the sensuous,
atmospheric, dangerously beautiful world of Old New
Orleans. Now, in this new novel by bestselling author
Barbara Hambly, he follows a trail of murder from illicit
back alleys to glittering mansions to a dark place where
the oldest and deadliest secrets lie buried . . .
Wet Grave
It's 1835 and the relentless glare of the late July sun has
slowed New Orleans to a standstill. When Hesione LeGros--
once a corsair's jeweled mistress, now a raddled hag--is
found slashed to death in a shanty on the fringe of New
Orleans's most lawless quarter, there are few to care. But
one of them is Benjamin January, musician and teacher. He
well recalls her blazing ebony beauty when she appeared,
exquisitely gowned and handy with a stiletto, at a
demimonde banquet years ago.
Who would want to kill this woman now--Hessy, they said,
would turn a trick for a bottle of rum--had some
quarrelsome "customer" decided to do away with her? Or
could it be one of the sexual predators who roamed the dark
and seedy streets? Or--as Benjamin comes to suspect--was
her killer someone she knew, someone whose careful search
of her shack suggests a cold-blooded crime? Someone whose
boot left a chillingly distinctive print . . .
His inquiries at taverns, markets, and slave dances reveal
little about "Hellfire Hessy" since her glory days in
Barataria Bay, once the lair of gentlemen pirates. Then the
murder is swept from his mind by the delivery of a crate
filled with contraband rifles--and yet another telltale
boot print left by its claimant. When a murder swiftly
follows, Ben and Rose Vitrac, the woman he loves, fear the
workings of a serpentine mind and a treacherous plot: one
only they can hope to thwart in time.
All too soon they are fugitives of color in the stormy
bayous and marshes of slave-stealer country, headed for
smugglers' haunts and sinister plantations, where one false
step could be their last toward a...Wet Grave.
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