Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of Hambly's outstanding 18th Benjamin January mystery (after 2020's Lady of Perdition), a well-to-do English couple in 1840 hire January, a free Black New Orleans musician with a reputation as a detective, to locate their 17-year-old daughter, Eve Russell, who recently vanished from a steamboat in Long Island Sound. January, who's also a French trained physician banned from practicing in the prejudiced United States, travels to New York City, where he finds racial hatred more poisonous than in New Orleans. He soon rescues a Black woman and her daughter from molesters, and aids a white man, Phineas T. Barnum, who's being pursued by moneylenders. The perilous search for Eve leads to an upstate community of religious phonies, who prey on credulous farmers and escaped slaves using the Underground Railroad to reach Canada, among others. Hambly's masterful historical detail, scrupulous character portrayal, and psychological analysis of human frailties contribute handsomely to her storytelling. This long-running series shows no signs of losing steam. Agent: Frances Collin, Frances Collin Literary. (Jan.)
Kirkus Review
A free man of color recently returned from a harrowing adventure risks his life to save a White woman. Benjamin January, born a slave, educated in medicine, husband, father, and finder of missing people, doesn't want to take on another case. He and his wife already make a living as teachers in New Orleans during the 1840s. But when Chloë and Henri Viellard introduce him to their British friends the Russells, who want him to find their missing daughter, Eve, it's not just the money that convinces him to do it. He learns that Eve had a deep interest in the new religious groups springing up all over upstate New York. Some of them are stops on the Underground Railroad, and January fears that if a reward is offered for Eve, hundreds of escaping slaves will be caught in the net. As a Black man, January must pose as the Viellards' servant to travel to New York--even then running the risk of being picked up and sold back into slavery. A chance meeting with P.T. Barnum gives him information about the Shining Herald, a woman who talks to the dead and is associated with the Rev. Broadax, whose new community, Blessed Land, Barnum knows to be a con. While he's looking for Eve, January is accused of murder and must hide with help from locals while struggling to unveil the horrors of the cult. A fascinating, sadly timely tale of the hero's struggles with his rage over the treatment of Black people. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The year: 1840. Benjamin January, a free man of color, doesn't think he has another major investigation in him, not so soon after the harrowing events described in Lady of Perdition (2020), but he's not one to refuse a friend's request. It seems a one-year-old girl has gone missing, apparently while on a steamboat crossing Long Island Sound. To find her, Benjamin must leave the (relatively) safe environment of New Orleans and travel to New York, where some people do not take kindly to free men of color walking about the place as if they belong there. While the eighteenth January novel has a solid story line, it's the setting that dominates the book. In Hambly's expert hands, New York is a dark, threatening place, in many ways a foreign land to January. Racism has always existed in the background of the January novels, but here this issue take center stage as Hambly lays bare the dark underbelly of American society in the mid-nineteenth century. A fine entry in an impressive series.