The Shirt On His Back

Starred review from April 25, 2011
Lt. Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guards, keen to apprehend the man who killed his younger brother, hires his friend Benjamin January to help track down the culprit in Hambly's superb 10th historical featuring the black freeman (after 2010's Dead and Buried). Left nearly penniless by the 1837 New Orleans bank failure, January needs no persuading to leave his beloved newly pregnant wife, Rose, and travel hundreds of miles into the Green River wilderness in the Rocky Mountains. Along the way, January and company encounter eccentric trappers, reptilian fur traders, tragic prostitutes, raging missionaries, and sensitively three-dimensional Sioux, Omahas, Crows, and Blackfeet. Their expedition plays out against the British-U.S. rivalry for the enormously profitable beaver fur trade, while American covered wagons toil on toward Oregon. As January struggles to survive fatigue, starvation, and assorted psychological horrors, Hambly convincingly shows that revenge must finally give way to justice.

June 1, 2011

A man heads into Indian territory in 1837.

When the banking system fails and his work as a New Orleans musician dries up, Benjamin January, a free man of color, leaves his pregnant wife Rose to venture west with Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guards. Shaw will pay him to help find out how his young brother Johnny came to be scalped at Fort Ivy, a fur-trade station some six weeks' distance beyond the frontier. Shaw's other brother, Tom, head man at the fort, discounts the story that Johnny ran afoul of a marauding Blackfoot. He believes that Johnny died because of Boden and Hepplewhite, two men intent on causing trouble at the summer Rendezvous. Tracking them, Shaw, January and his recovering opium addict friend Hannibal (Dead and Buried, 2010, etc.) learn of skirmishes between the Hudson Bay Company and the American Fur Company for beaver pelts; the near-rape of a member of the Omahas; and an old dead man left naked by hands that could have belonged to Omahas, Sioux, Blackfeet, Crows, Delawares, Shoshones or even Manitou Wildman, the raging giant whose boxing skills almost defeated January. Seven white men and many Indians will die before the New Orleans contingent is captured by the Crows and delayed justice is meted out.

An absorbing if appalling look at whiskey debauchery, suspect rifle trading, smallpox devastation, a mass poisoning endeavor, the decimation of the beaver population and grisly confrontations with warring tribes, all of which surround a classic whodunit.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2011

The tenth entry in this outstanding historical series (Dead and Buried) is set in the Rockies as our hero, a free man of color, attends the annual rendezvous of mountain men.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2011
Benjamin January, free man of color in New Orleans, needs money. All the banks in the country have crashed, and his wife is expecting their child. When Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the City Guards offers him a job, he jumps at it, despite the fact that it will take him away from home for an extended period. Shaw seeks vengeance for his brothers murder and believes the killer will be at the rendezvous of mountain men in the Rocky Mountains. The annual encampment involves drinking cheap liquor, engaging in shooting matches, and swapping tall tales as well as selling furs and making shady business deals. Amidst it all, the body of a clean-shaven man wearing only a pair of black kid gloves turns up. Abishag and Benjamin uncover a sinister mass murder plot as they investigate. The latest entry in this flamboyant historical series is again full of period detail. Hambly paints a vivid, convincing picture of the life of free blacks before the Civil War.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)