Ran Away, Barbara Hambly

4 stars

First Sentence: Word flashed through the town like pebbles flying from an explosion.

Thoughts: The world runs on gossip, the more scandalous the better. The gossip in New Orleans in the fall of 1837 was especially scandalous, rivaling the speed of light in how quickly it spread. It had everything: sex, death, and weird foreign folk with weird foreign customs.

What was this delicious gossip? Simply this: A Turkish visitor to the Crescent City had murdered two of his concubines and threw their bodies out an upstairs window of his rented house. Why? Who the heck knows, probably something to do with honor. Everyone knows those Muslim guys are like Klingons when it comes to honor.

Only one person in the entire city didn’t believe the gossip. That person was Our Hero, Benjamin January. Why didn’t he believe it? Because he knew Hüseyin Pasha, the accused man. They had met ten years ago when he was living in Paris. And so the Trilogy of Backstory becomes complete because now we finally get to meet Ayasha before she died.

Like Rose, Ayasha helped Ben out with his mysteries. She was the one who introduced him to Hüseyin Pasha’s wife Jamilla when one of the concubines fell ill. It was particularly dangerous because this concubine was also pregnant with what the fortuneteller claimed was a boy. It was even more dangerous than that because when Ben arrived he discovered Shamira, the concubine, was actually being poisoned. He did what he could for her, but didn’t hold out much hope for the baby.

Then Shamira disappeared. There were rumors that she was at a nearby convent planning to convert from Judaism to Christianity. A complicated plot unwinds, involving fallen Parisian nobility, a priest, Ben’s Jewish friend who liked slumming, and Hüseyin’s political rival from the Ottoman Empire who vowed revenge on the Pasha. Benjamin and Hüseyin ended up teaming up to rescue Ayasha from the political rival and locating the missing Shamira.

A decade later, Hüseyin is in the Cabildo awaiting trial and/or word from the Turkish embassy in Cuba. Benjamin knows that Hüseyin isn’t capable of murdering anyone, especially one of his concubines, and especially especially not two of them. He gets permission to search the house where he finds clues that the concubines were dead for a while before they were pitched out the window. He also discovered they weren’t murdered in the house. Turns out they had been missing for a while before the pharmacist across the street reported their precipitous fall. (The pharmacist, by the way, is entirely too interested in this case. Hmmmmm.)

The mystery in Hüseyin’s house begins to tie in with a mystery at the livery stable behind his house. There are strange doings in the stables, but no one involved will say much about it because revealing those secrets will reveal others that are best yet unrevealed. For the moment, at least.

Then Ben finds out Hüseyin’s old rival has been seen in New Orleans, and he knows from experience the rival is more than capable of murdering women. Also, someone has been sneaking opium into Jamilla’s medication. Why someone would want to drug her will be one of the keys to the whole mystery. Getting her off the opium will be more tricky. Fortunately Hannibal is on hand to help her through the withdrawal. He’s a good man, our Hannibal.