#1 – A Free Man of Color
In New Orleans during Mardi Gras in 1833, physician and music teacher Benjamin January is playing at the Salle d’Orléans when Angélique Crozat, a celebrated woman of colour, is found strangled. The white authorities show little interest in her death, but January’s knowledge of the city’s…
#2 – Fever Season
New Orleans is overwhelmed by yellow fever in the summer of 1833, and Benjamin January works through the nights at Charity Hospital while continuing to teach music by day. A request to carry a message from a runaway enslaved woman draws him into the affairs of…
#3 – Graveyard Dust
During the St John’s Eve celebrations of 1834, Benjamin January learns that his sister Olympe has been arrested for murder. The evidence is slight, but Olympe is a defiant woman of colour associated with vodou, making her an easy target for officials who have little reason…
#4 – Sold Down the River
Plantation owner Simon Fourchet asks Benjamin January to investigate sabotage, arson and murder at Mon Triomphe, the estate where January was enslaved as a child. January despises Fourchet, but he knows that if the culprit is not found the plantation’s enslaved workers will be punished collectively.…
#5 – Die Upon a Kiss
In February 1835, an Italian impresario brings a controversial operatic version of Othello to New Orleans. Benjamin January is wounded while preventing an attack on the producer, and the violence raises questions about theatrical rivalry, sexual jealousy and hostility to a drama centred on a Black…
#6 – Wet Grave
In the oppressive summer of 1835, Hesione LeGros, once the glamorous mistress of a Barataria pirate, is found murdered in a poor district outside New Orleans. Benjamin January remembers her former wealth and confidence, and the careful search of her shack suggests that the killer wanted…
#7 – Days of the Dead
Benjamin January and his new wife Rose travel to Mexico in 1835 after learning that their friend Hannibal Sefton has been accused of murdering the son of a powerful landowner. At Hacienda Mictlán, the evidence against Hannibal appears overwhelming, while family rivalries and an unstable patriarch…
#8 – Dead Water
Benjamin January is hired to follow bank official Oliver Weems, who has fled New Orleans with money needed to save the school January and Rose established for freed people. They pursue him aboard the steamboat Silver Moon, travelling through a region where their legal freedom becomes…
#9 – Dead and Buried
At a funeral in New Orleans in 1836, a mishap overturns the coffin and reveals that the body inside is not the man whose burial the mourners have gathered to attend. Benjamin January’s friend Hannibal Sefton recognises the unknown white corpse but refuses to explain how…
#10 – The Shirt on His Back
After a bank collapse leaves Benjamin January short of money, he accompanies Abishag Shaw to the annual rendezvous of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. Shaw is searching for the person responsible for his brother’s death, while January enters a temporary settlement crowded with trappers, traders, Indigenous…
#11 – Ran Away
When two women disappear from the household of Huseyin Pasha, a visiting Ottoman official, no runaway notices are posted. After a witness claims to have seen him throw their bodies from a window, racial and religious prejudice make the foreigner an immediately convincing murder suspect. Benjamin…
#12 – Good Man Friday
In 1838, Benjamin January travels to Washington with Henri and Chloë Viellard to search for a missing friend. The disappearance leads into a world of political agents, slave catchers, coded messages and men whose public respectability conceals private violence. January receives help from a young Edgar…
#13 – Crimson Angel
Jefferson Vitrack, the white half-brother of Rose January, arrives with a clue to a family treasure hidden in Haiti. Benjamin refuses to join the search, but Vitrack’s murder and attacks on Benjamin and Rose convince him that the killers will continue until someone finds the gold.…
#14 – Drinking Gourd
Benjamin January travels to Vicksburg to aid a wounded conductor on the Underground Railroad. When the local station’s leading organiser is murdered, coordinator Jubal Cain is accused but cannot defend himself without exposing the network of safe houses and the fugitives it protects. January investigates among…
#15 – Murder in July
In the summer of 1839, British spymaster Sir John Oldmixton asks Benjamin January to identify an Englishman found dead in a New Orleans canal. January refuses until evidence connects the corpse to a murder he failed to solve in Paris during the July Revolution nine years…
#16 – Cold Bayou
Benjamin January agrees to play at the wedding of elderly Creole landowner Veryl St-Chinian and the much younger Ellie Trask. The marriage threatens inheritances and alliances throughout the interconnected St-Chinian and Viellard families before the guests even reach the isolated Cold Bayou plantation. A body with…
#17 – Lady of Perdition
In 1840, Benjamin January enters the Republic of Texas to find his former pupil Selina Bellinger, who has been kidnapped and enslaved. He is nearly hanged before Valentina Taggart, wife of the owner of Rancho Perdition, intervenes to save him. When Valentina is accused of murdering…
#18 – House of the Patriarch
Benjamin January travels to New York in 1840 to find seventeen-year-old Eve Russell, who boarded a steamboat but apparently vanished before it reached its destination. Her disappearance seems impossible until January begins examining the passengers, crew and religious communities that may have offered her refuge. New…
#19 – Death and Hard Cider
New Orleans prepares a vast rally for Whig presidential candidate William Henry Harrison in September 1840. Benjamin January has little interest in the campaign, but political receptions and dances provide badly needed work for a professional musician. After Marie-Joyeuse Maginot is murdered, January’s friend Catherine Clisson…
#20 – The Nubian’s Curse
In December 1840, Benjamin January is reunited with Arithmus, a Sudanese man of extraordinary mathematical ability whom he last saw in France fifteen years earlier. Their earlier acquaintance ended after British explorer Deverel Wishart died in terror at a supposedly haunted château and Arithmus disappeared. January…
#21 – Murder in the Trembling Lands
During Carnival in February 1841, Benjamin January is summoned from a masked ball to attend a duel provoked by an accusation that a newcomer is a Black man passing as white. The stranger dies, but January’s examination shows that the fatal shot came from behind and…