Good Man Friday

Barbara Hambly's twelfth Benjamin January novel starts out in New Orleans in 1838. Kirsten Potter's performance highlights Hambly's meticulous historical research and gives immediacy to the period details. January, a free man of color who is a trained surgeon and a musician, loses his job after he helps a dying "fighting slave." To feed his family, January agrees to help planter Henri Viellard find a missing friend. Potter handles the horrors and brutality of a world of grave robbers and slave stealers with understated intensity. She gives the well-drawn characters individual personalities, including a young Edgar Allan Poe and Ganymede Tyler, the "good man Friday" of the title. January's experiences are fraught with violence, ferocity, and peril, and Potter makes them all feel real. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

Starred review from April 15, 2013
Historical horrors abound in Hambly’s excellent 12th Benjamin January novel (after 2011’s Ran Away). By showing compassion for a dying fighting slave, January—a free black man and surgeon–turned–piano player in antebellum New Orleans—loses his musician job. To support his family, he agrees to help wealthy planter Henri Viellard (whose mistress is January’s sister Minou) locate a missing friend—elderly English mathematician Selwyn Singletary. Along with Veillard, Minou, and Viellard’s chilly wife, Chloe, he travels to a decadent Washington, D.C., inhabited by slave stealers, grave robbers, spies, and venal legislators. Hambly’s brilliantly conceived cast includes a young Edgar Allan Poe, a sinister British spymaster, a New England abolitionist promoting an early form of baseball, and a courageous and loyal slave named Ganymede Tyler, the eponymous “Man Friday.” Hambly brings back to life a world where Congressmen obliviously pass chained men without a glance, forcing her readers to wonder painfully with January, “Jesus, where are you now?” Agent: Frances Collin Literary Agency.