Barbara Hambly

Two women--southerner Susanna Ashford and northerner Cora Poole--exchange letters throughout the Civil War, writing about the ordeal of a familiar world torn apart by tragedy, about books and art, about loss and longing, about their future and the future of their country, about love, about being a woman in nineteenth-century America, about friendship, and about the triumphant resilience of the human spirit.

Vampire Don Simon Ysido has been captured and held aboard a ship heading to the US to act as a slave, and Dr Lydia Asher must stop it... at any cost. March, 1917. The goal of every government involved in the Great War has been achieved: industrialist Spenser Cochran has drugged and enslaved a vampire, Don Simon Ysidro, to do his bidding, and is now on the way to the US aboard a luxury ship. Horrified, Dr Lydia Asher secures her passage on the vessel...

"When British spymaster Sir John Oldmixton offers Benjamin January a hundred dollars to find the murderer of an Englishman whose body has been found floating in the New Basin Canal, Benjamin turns him down immediately. As a free man of colour in New Orleans in the sweltering July of 1839, he knows this is not something he should get mixed up in. But when clues to the dead man's identity link the death to another murder, in another July in January's...

1924. After six months in Hollywood, young British widow Emma Blackstone has come to love her new employer, glamourous movie-star Kitty Flint - even if her late husband's sister is one of the worst actresses she's ever seen. Looking after Kitty and her three adorable Pekinese dogs isn't work Emma dreamed of, but Kitty rescued her when she was all alone in the world. Now, the worst thing academically-minded Emma has to worry about is the shocking historical...

"New Orleans, 1840. Freshly home from a dangerous journey, the last thing Benjamin January wants to do is leave his wife and young sons again. But when old friends Henri and Chloe Viellard ask for his help tracking down a missing girl in distant New York, he can't say no. Three weeks ago, seventeen-year-old Eve Russell boarded a steam-boat and never got off it. Mrs Russell is adamant Eve's been kidnapped, but how could someone remove a teenager from...

"A cursed statue... A haunted house... A seemingly supernatural death... The unexpected arrival of a friend from his past plunges musician, sleuth and free man of color Benjamin January into an old, unsolved case in this historical mystery set in New Orleans. December 1840. Surgeon turned piano-player Benjamin January is looking forward to a peaceful holiday with his family. But the arrival of an old friend brings unexpected news - and unexpected...

When Jefferson Vitrack - the white half-brother of Benjamin January's wife - turns up on January's doorstep in the summer of 1838 claiming he has discovered a clue to the whereabouts of the family's lost treasure, January has no hesitation about refusing to help look for it. For the treasure lies in Haiti, the island that was once France's most profitable colony - until the blood-chilling repression practiced there by the whites upon their slaves...

When free black musician and surgeon Benjamin January attends the funeral of a friend, an accident tips the dead man out of his coffin--only to reveal an unexpected inhabitant. Set in New Orleans in 1836.