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Sold Down the River
By: Barbara Hambly , Elisa StanfordeBook Publisher: Random House
Imprint: Random House Publishing Group
Series: A Benjamin January Novel #4
Format: ePub Encrypted (DRM)
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In A Free Man of Color, Fever Season, and Graveyard Dust, Benjamin January penetrated the murkiest corners of glittering old New Orleans to bring murderers to justice. Now, in bestselling author Barbara Hambly's haunting new novel, he explores a vivid and violent plantation world darker than anything in the city.... Sold Down the River.
The crisp autumn air of 1834 awakens the French Town to a new season of balls and operas. But this November there will be no waltzes played by Benjamin January, no piano lessons for Creole children. For a shadow has emerged from his past-Simon Fourchet, the savage man to whom he was bound in slavery until the age of seven. When someone he cannot refuse asks the favor, Benjamin reluctantly agrees to reenter the realm of his childhood on Fourchet's upriver sugar plantation.
Abandoning his Parisian French for the African patois of a field hand, Benjamin sets out to uncover who and what lies behind the sinister happenings there. On All Souls' night, at the dark of the moon, a fire was started in the mill. A field gang's food has been poisoned and the butler murdered. And voodoo curse marks appear everywhere. If the villain cannot be discovered, every slave on Mon Triomphe will be condemned to what passes for justice.
Cutting cane from dawn to nightfall, until his bones ache and his musician's hands bleed, Benjamin strives to unlock the riddle. Are these the omens of a slave revolt, or something more personal? As acts of sabotage mount and voodoo signs multiply, he ponders the family in the big house: Fourchet's pale and pious new wife, his two grown sons, and his shrewish daughter-in-law. Then the inhabitants of the slave quarters: a proud and secretive cook, young lovers torn apart by a brutal overseer, men and women who long for loved ones sold away. And what of the neighboring planter, feuding with Fourchet over a piece of land... or the elusive river trader who knows so many of the servants' secrets?
Somewhere in the warp and weft of these people's lives lurks Benjamin's quarry-whose scheming could destroy not just Fourchet but all his kin and every human being he owns. And Benjamin January must use all his intelligence and cunning to find the killer, before he finds himself... Sold Down the River.
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Title of eBook: Sold Down the River | Series: A Benjamin January Novel, , #4 |
| Release Date: 01-26-2011 | |
| Allowed Countries (hover) | |
| Publisher: Random House Publishing Group |
This eBook download is available in the following formats:
| Parent title | Sold Down the River |
|---|---|
| Encrypted (DRM) | Yes |
| SKU | 9780307785305 |
| File size | 866 |
| Internet Security | n/a |
| Printing | Not allowed |
| Copying | Not allowed |
| Read aloud | No Sys requirements Download reader |
| Devices | Samsung Tablet, Apple Ipad & Iphone, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo eReader, Aluratek Libre, Iliad, Nokia, Blackberry, Hanlin |
| Note | ePub, short for electronic publication is one of our favorites and should be yours for a couple of reasons. ePub offers reflowable text giving you flexibility to manipulate how the content is presented. Moreover, lots of cool features are now being developed for the reader like advanced video and audio. ePub is now an industry standard, so all of the "non-propreitary" hardware manufacturers are now supporting it. |
Sold Down the River
When someone ties you naked to a tree in the yard and beats you unconscious with a broom handle, you don't soon forget it, or him.
"Ben, you remember Monsieur Fourchet," said his mother.
Standing in the doorway of her parlor, Benjamin January felt the hair lift on his nape at the sight of the man beside the window.
In the nightmares, he was taller.
Fourchet turned from the long French door that looked out onto Rue Burgundy, and January saw that he was, in fact, just slightly under six feet tall: more than three inches shorter than his own towering height. That he was wide through the chest and shoulders, but without January's massive strength. In the nightmares his hair was black, not streaky gray and thin, and his face, although creased with a lifetime's rage and cruelty, didn't have the broken network of lines that gouged the sunken cheeks, bracketed the harsh mouth, accentuated the sag beneath the chin.
The eyes were the same. Arrogant, dark, and cold.
But the man had grown old.
"I remember," he told his mother.
"You've grown." Fourchet took a seat in one of the straw-colored chintz chairs of which January's mother was so proud.
Between seven and forty-one I'd belong in a raree-show if I hadn't. January couldn't resist saying, "Monsieur Janvier fed me very well. Sir."
Fourchet hadn't. The slaves on Fourchet's Bellefleur Plantation, where January had been born, had what were called provision lands, small plots where they could grow corn and yams. On most plantations these augmented whatever rations of cornmeal and salt pork the planter saw fit to distribute. On Bellefleur, Fourchet had skimped the women and t...
"Ben, you remember Monsieur Fourchet," said his mother.
Standing in the doorway of her parlor, Benjamin January felt the hair lift on his nape at the sight of the man beside the window.
In the nightmares, he was taller.
Fourchet turned from the long French door that looked out onto Rue Burgundy, and January saw that he was, in fact, just slightly under six feet tall: more than three inches shorter than his own towering height. That he was wide through the chest and shoulders, but without January's massive strength. In the nightmares his hair was black, not streaky gray and thin, and his face, although creased with a lifetime's rage and cruelty, didn't have the broken network of lines that gouged the sunken cheeks, bracketed the harsh mouth, accentuated the sag beneath the chin.
The eyes were the same. Arrogant, dark, and cold.
But the man had grown old.
"I remember," he told his mother.
"You've grown." Fourchet took a seat in one of the straw-colored chintz chairs of which January's mother was so proud.
Between seven and forty-one I'd belong in a raree-show if I hadn't. January couldn't resist saying, "Monsieur Janvier fed me very well. Sir."
Fourchet hadn't. The slaves on Fourchet's Bellefleur Plantation, where January had been born, had what were called provision lands, small plots where they could grow corn and yams. On most plantations these augmented whatever rations of cornmeal and salt pork the planter saw fit to distribute. On Bellefleur, Fourchet had skimped the women and t...
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