Days of the Dead (Benjamin January, Book 7), by Barbara Hambly

[rachelmanija]

Ben and Rose have just gotten married when they receive a letter from Hannibal saying that he's being held prisoner in a Gothic mansion in Mexico where he's forced to play the violin for the delusional owner of the mansion who has regular hallucinatory conversations with Aztec Gods; he can't flee because, among other obstacles, the police want to hang him as the believe he poisoned the owner's son. Ben and Rose to the rescue!

This had a lot of very thought-provoking and sensitive stuff on the historical treatment of mental illness, legal slavery vs slavery in all but name, religion, and Ben's dilemma of never having a place where he can both feel at home and not have to deal with racism. This was all neatly married to a solid murder mystery, a family drama, and tons of adventure and bonding. Hambly is really good at writing established couples who are still madly in love, and I really enjoyed all the Ben/Rose moments as well as the Ben/Rose & Hannibal. The supporting characters were vivid and interesting, as was the new setting.

The climax didn't rise to quite the batshit heights of the last one, but not for want of trying.



I was extremely satisfied by the climax, which featured 1) Hannibal nearly getting his heart cut out on an Aztec altar as part of a baroque plot to frame an actual madman for being mad, 2) someone tumbling dead down the pyramid steps down which so many heartless human sacrifices had tumbled before, 3) Hannibal suffering from a broken leg, laudanum deprivation, exhaustion, and consumption, 4) an actual ghost, 5) tons of comfort, friendship, heroics, and love, 6) Rose being offhandedly badass, 7) hilarious Rose-Ben banter over poor Ben having to hide in the scorpion and tarantula-infested hidey-hole behind a statue of the Aztec God of Death in the hope of impersonating it, 8) the skeletons of five dead wives, one still wearing a sapphire necklace, 9) deadly peanut allergies.



Grimness quotient: Low, all things considered. There's a visit to an asylum which is awful and tragic, but the man running it is compassionate; it's mostly about how people just had no idea what to do about mental illness then. Some people stuck in miserable nunneries. Poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, but also lots of people just living their lives and managing to make pretty good ones despite it all.

Days of the Dead (Benjamin January, Book 7)

Comments

[sovay]

I was extremely satisfied by the climax, which feature

DON'T FORGET DOÑA VIOLA.

(Technically she belongs to the epilogue, but still.)

[rachelmanija]

Oh my God, there was so much going on that I actually did forget her! Which just goes to show how absolutely bonkers the final sequence is.

[oracne]

This book was the one where I decided Hambly realized she would never be able to kill Hannibal off, so his TB needed to improve somehow.

[rachelmanija]

Maybe he got a supernatural blessing in this one!

[cloudsinvenice]

This sounds amazing! I've heard a lot of good things about that series. Does it matter whether they are read in order?

[rachelmanija]

You don't have to start at the beginning, but once you start, you should read sequentially from there. I'd start with Wet Grave rather than here, as a lot of important Ben-and-Rose stuff happens in that one.

[cloudsinvenice]

Thank you!

[skygiants]

This isn't one of my favorites -- half because I love the one before it SO MUCH and the other half because I'm so tired of Aztec Human Sacrifice -- but the death by deadly peanut allergy is literally the only murder method from any of the books that I can consistently remember.