The Shirt on His Back, Barbara Hambly

5 stars

First Sentence: The third time that day that Benjamin January walked over to the Bank of Louisiana and found its doors locked, he had to admit the truth.

Thoughts: It’s 1837 and, thanks to Andrew Jackson’s short-sighted fiscal policy, the economy has collapsed once he left office. And that’s one of many reasons why it is vital for us as Americans to get his face off the $20 bill. The economic depression means that most of the banks have closed, including the Bank of Louisiana where the Januarys’ money resided.

Defeated by the locked doors, Ben goes home where Rose greets him with two bits of news, one good, one bad. They have exactly $2.50 in cash left to their names and she’s pregnant. You get to decide which is good and which is bad.

This is when good fortune smiles upon the Januarys in the form of Lt. Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans Police. He has a paying proposition for Ben. Not official business, but personal. Someone’s murdered Shaw’s younger brother Johnny out west and it’s up to Shaw to find the man what done it and kill him in return. He and Ben will work their way out to the edge of the Rockies working for Shaw’s older brother Tom’s fur trading outfit.

Wait, Shaw has brothers? I guess now that we’ve learned all of Hannibal’s secrets it’s time to learn Abishag’s. Not complaining. I like when the side characters in my mystery series are fully realized with backstories and everything.

Ben, Shaw, and Hannibal* arrive at the annual Rendezvous of the Mountain Men, the summer gathering where all the fur trappers come out of the mountains to sell the pelts they’ve collected as they do their level best to hunt the native beavers to extinction**. They get drunk, swap stories, and visit the local hooker tent while they sell their pelts to the various companies vying for their trade. There are fewer this year because the Rocky Mountain Fur Company and the American Fur Company have been buying up the smaller outfits. Step 3: Profit!

Shortly after the New Orleans contingent get their tents set up, the one man who could identify Johnny Shaw’s killer is himself killed in a fight over an Omaha maid. Well, crap. Ben starts questioning everyone else in the camp who might have known Johnny and his elusive killer, but he doesn’t get far.

Meanwhile Hannibal has been doing what he does best: charming the ladies. He got a job playing violin at the hooker tent, befriended most of the prostitutes, and married to a nice Crow lady named Morning Star. It’s a rendezvous marriage so it’ll break up once the camp does, but until then Hannibal has someone to share his tent with and their investigative team has a valuable ally in the American Indian sector.

The investigation heats up considerably when a dead man is found outside the rendezvous. He’s an old man, not a trapper, and has been stripped completely naked except for black kid gloves. He had a cut throat, a broken leg, and a stab wound in the back. Not scalped, though, so they know it was a white man what done it. No one has any earthly idea who this man is, even after Ben and Abishag parade the entire rendezvous past his body.

Then articles of the man’s clothing begin to show up around camp. With these clues, Shaw and Ben, with the help of Morning Star’s extended family and Viente-y-Cinco, a lady of dubious virtue, uncover both the identity of the murdered man and the location of Johnny’s murderer. But will they be able to catch him before he kills again? Will Abishag get revenge for his brother’s death? Will Ben be able gather enough notes to satisfy Rose about the flora and fauna of the American West? And most importantly, will he be able to keep hold of her expensive magnifying glass? If he loses that he might as well not come home at all, baby or no baby.

*He quit opium over the winter. It was an emotionally fraught time so Ben isn’t comfortable leaving him in New Orleans alone without any work over the summer.

**I’m fine with hunting as long as it’s done responsibly. They didn’t know how to do that back in the Old West of the 1830s. That’s why they had to parachute beavers back into Idaho in the 1940s.