Barbara HamblyReviews

I love this book! The historical details are fascinating, the people are believable and sympathetic, and the story is dramatic and exciting. And the love story is very sweet and understated. Altogether an awesome read.

Book 2 in the Silver Screen series. Compared to Scandal in Babylon, there's a little more depth to the main characters as their story (and back story) develops, and some truly engaging secondary characters are introduced. There's also some gripping action, both onscreen (actual carnage on the set of a war epic) and off (attempted murder and piracy on the high seas! says the bootlegger before contacting the FBI). I enjoyed this more than the first in the series and look forward to sequels.

I love the way Emma's brain keeps coming up with appropriate lines from Homer's Odyssey during their ordeal. Her professor would be proud, she thinks distractedly. Her tendency to frame 1920s Hollywood in classical terms is always a joy (although challenging to one's Latin), but the Odyssey sequence (thank God that since about 1940, nobody supplies Homeric lines in the original Greek) is simply priceless.

F/SF

Trying a dragon/fantasy to see if I would like it, but just couldn't get into it. Gave it 110 pages, but not my cup of tea. Sorry Mrs. Hambly.

gave a taste of new Orleans in the period-story was basically good-characters also-will try another -no real surprises but an enjoyable read

I wasn't sure what I thought of the idea of the 1st lady as a detective, but I love the Adams family so I gave it a try.
The only irritating part was the attribution of modern ideas about crime to people living in the 1700's.
Understanding the psychology of the serial killer and the importance of chain of evidence, felt it a bit far fetched.

Killer was certainly no surprise, but that was because author played fair

I read the first book in this series many years ago; it’s interesting enough worldbuilding that I remembered enough to continue. Magic has taken over from tech and mutated lots of formerly human people; our heroes are wandering across the country trying to rescue the leader’s sister, who’s become a “flare” who is captured by something big and evil living in the heartland. It was enjoyable if you like this kind of thing.

Based on the synopsis, I thought this was going to be a cozy or farcical tale of a mage school dropout and a pig farmer fighting a dragon. Instead, it's more like the plot of the Hobbit with the characters and themes of Middlemarch.

This was a rather refreshing book, with a female mercenary who is really good at what she does, and a whole group of women learning that they can run businesses when their men are captured, and that end up decent soldiers as well. It also shows a bit how disconcerting this is to the whole of their society, which isn't used to women with agency. I found the relationships to be well balanced. Sun Wolf and Starhawk find out separately that they like each other in another capacity than professional, and they do so realistically. Fortunately no gushing. I found the relationship between Sun Wolf and the women who kidnap him to be realistic as well.

I can't quite figure out why this isn't a 5 star for me, despite all that. Somehow I can't find anything wrong with it, and I see a great deal of good, including things that are rare to get right in fantasy, but still this book didn't draw me into its world as much as I would like.

This was not a very good book. The story is ok (sorceress needs to find out who wants to kill her sister at her wedding night without letting anyone know she's illegally using magic), but Hambly is overdoing it with the descriptions. Mind you, I'm not anti-description. But in this case, things get described that really have nothing to do with the story and that you don't really want to know. I'll give you a very small example:
She waited while Joblin fetched a silver crown and a few silver bits from one of the blue-and-yellow porcelain crocks on the shelf above the bin-table.

Why do we need to know how much money he is taking? Why do we need to know that the money is in a porcelain crock? Why do we need to know the thing is blue and yellow? Or that is in on a shelf? Or that said shelf is above the bin table?

And this is only a one-sentence example. There are whole paragraphs like this. In my case,it makes my mind zone out and I soon started to read the entire book diagonally.

Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January historical mystery series is a favorite of mine. Given that The Nubian's Curse is the twentieth volume in the series, it must be a favorite of a good many others. The series is set in the mid 18th Century, primarily in New Orleans. January is a free man of color with a wide range of life experiences. He was born a slave, then was purchased by his mother when she became a placee (a sort of mistress/concubine) of a wealthy white man. He's a gifted musician; he's also studied medicine. He's lived in both slave-holding and free states; he's also lived in France.

The range of January's life experiences is what gives this series its power. January has lived in enough places that he understands the ways the rules of race differ by location. In the U.S., he's always at risk of being captured as a runaway slave and sold "down the river," despite being a free man. In New Orleans, he's generally a respected figure. His social opportunities are limited because of his race, but he is friends with an interesting mix of individuals, Black and white, wealthy and poor. In Paris, he had the freedom to interact with whites in ways that would have placed him at risk of violence in the U.S.

The Nubian's Curse is a two time-period novel. The mystery at its heart began in Paris with the murder of a white scientist and showman. That man's business partner, Arithmus, a Black man born in Africa who has exceptional memory and numerical skills is presumed to be guilty of the crime. When one of January's friends from Paris, a white woman, arrives in New Orleans and explains that Arithmus is in the U.S. living on a plantation to which she must travel, January winds up traveling with her and with the wealthy, recently-orphaned young woman who she is escorting to the guardian named in her father's will. Of course, January isn't "just" travelling with her. He's joined by a white friend, a fiddler, a former (and perhaps current) reprobate and acts as this man's servant.

The mystery here is complex and involves several more important threads that I haven't included in this summary. Past and present overlap.

If you enjoy historical mysteries, particularly those that examine uncomfortable periods in U.S. history, you'll be deeply satisfied with The Nubian's Curse or any other of Hambly's Benjamin January novels. Hambly handles this series with a deftness that makes it possible to begin with any volume in the series without feeling ungrounded. The Nubian's Curse is being released in January 2024 and is worth keeping an eye out for. In the meanwhile, if you come across a different Benjamin January mystery, read and enjoy.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

Barbara Hambly is an excellent writer who has written better books, but clearly this one must have been written as a fun vacation for her, between all the backgrounding of old Silent Film Hollywood, the garish and pulpy tone suitable for the goings-on of its Hollywood Babylon world, amid the layered plot surrounding a Chinatown occult horror that must be isolated and stopped. i read it for fun, and it worked for me.½

Pre-Revolutionary War plot with Edgar Allen Poe as a main character (before his horror thrillers and rabies bite). Slavery (well described). Some Profanity. Narrator did accents well and clearly - her usual performance.

Unusual blend of fantasy and horror, with two (80s) contemporary characters persuaded to help in a last ditch struggle against Lovecraftian type monsters in another parallel world. This series has it all: magic, warriors, monsters, edge of the seat suspense, political struggles, romance. Flawed characters and the non obvious e.g. who ends up paired with whom. I first read it a long time ago and have re-read it a few times since, latest re-read August 2020.

On this re-read, I will just add this to my overall summary under the first book: as the trilogy enters the closing laps, the characters are put through the ringer even more, with more political shenanigans, treachery, hopeless endeavours, and backs to the wall. If I was reading this fresh now, I might have taken off a star from vols 2 and 3, because there are some aspects, such as the over sentimental portrayal of Queen Minalde/Alde, and the occasional bit of head-hopping between characters within a scene, that I find slightly irritating, but staying true to my original perception and in view of this still being very enjoyable, I am sticking with the original 5 star rating for each volume.

See short summary for book 1 - the only thing I would modify this with, on August 2020 re-read, is that this does suffer slightly from the middle book of a trilogy syndrome, because the characters are split up and I did remember the big shock-horror revelation early on in my re-read. But staying true to my original perception, I am leaving this at 5 stars.

In this 6th volume of the series, Lydia Asher is in Paris at the hospital bedside of her husband James who is a coma following a fall from a church tower - except that to her and her vampire friend, Don Simon Ysidro, to whom she turns for help, he bears the marks of a vampire attack. The story then follows her attempts with Simon's help to find out what James was doing in Paris and why he has been attacked, while he lies too ill to move and various enemies close in along with the German guns, WWI having broken out. The story is fairly convoluted following the twin machinations of Germans who want to use vampires as a weapon of war, the attempts by various groups to locate a fabled vampire artefact, and the threat by hostile vampires to finish off James. Meanwhile James is having dreams in which he is an onlooker on events in Simon's life in 17th century Paris which have a bearing on the current crisis.

I think this book would have worked much better if it had been a spinoff from the series and dealt with Simon's life in the past from his point of view rather than James Asher's. He is by far the most interesting character in this series and it becomes a bit tiresome to have the reiterated dilema of the Ashers spelled out - that vampires are evil, that James has now turned to hunting them, and that they should kill Simon but depend on him too much for protection against other vampires. If Simon's interactions in the 17th century with other vampires and the church officials who were manipulating him by holding out hope of his salvation, and his conflict between that and his strong friendship with the then vampire Master of Paris, plus his relationship with his human servant Tim who, like the church, wants him to kill 'heretic' vampires, had been the focus of the story instead of appearing as tantalising snippets I think it would have been absorbing. As it is, to some extent this book goes over well trodden old ground and I find the Ashers increasingly irritating and irrelevant, so for me this was only a 3 star read and I won't be bothering with any more of this series. A pity after the absorbing first two volumes, but too many of them since then have been following a formula and falling flat by failing to deliver on promising beginnings.

After enjoying book 2 of this series - which I thought at first was a standalone novel - I decided to obtain a copy of the first book despite having a sketchy idea of what had transpired from the book 2 backstory.

Briefly, James Asher philologist, Oxford lecturer and ex-spy, and his wife Lydia - a rich heiress who has managed to fight societal pressures in order to become a doctor and medical researcher in 1904 - are drawn into the affairs of the Undead when one of them approaches James, initially blackmailing him with Lydia's safety, to help with tracking down whoever is killing vampires.

Had I not known that certain characters survived until book 2, the suspenseful sequences would have been even more so, but they were so well constructed and written that it was still a very enjoyable read. I liked most of the main characters with the exception of Lydia although she wasn't quite so irritating this time around, mainly because she has less of a role in the story.

The only thing that held this back from a full 5 star rating was that although the characters are English quite a few Americanisms pop up, sometimes rather inconsistently - for example, the references to railroads in most places and then a switch to the correct railway - and references to garbage cans which in one place becomes the correct dustbins (given the frugal way of living most people of the time had to follow, the only 'rubbish' thrown away was the coaldust generated by domestic fires and hence the name dustbin which persists to this day- at that time, even rags and bones were sold for a small coin or two). As a UK reader these mistakes - despite correctly at one point describing the lowest floor of a building as ground rather than the American usage of first - were jarring and threw me out of the story's flow momentarily. But otherwise a very enjoyable read rating 4 stars.

After the slight disappointment of volume 3 and not having a copy of the fourth in the series, I picked up this one not sure what to expect. It started off very promisingly and different to others: after Miranda, daughter of protagonists James and Lydia Asher is kidnapped by the vampire Master of London to force Lydia to work for him and find for him a vampire rival who has moved onto his patch (James is out of the country), the focus is on Lydia and how she has to manage which includes calling once more upon the services of Don Simon Isidro, a vampire since Elizabethan days. Both she and James are decidedly ambiguous about their relationship with Simon, who has on several occasions put his existence into jeopardy for them and been injured in the process yet whom they can never quite forget depends upon murder for his existence - for in Hambly's take on vampires it is the psychic energy released by the death of the victim which is just as essential for vampires as blood.

Where the story lost momentum for me was after James returned from abroad. There were a lot of characters to juggle - Lydia is having to chaperone a niece who is 'coming out' in society while keeping quiet about her daughter's abduction and how she is spending her time doing research - luckily she is able to hire the services of some private detectives for some of the legwork - and so there is interaction with a whole host of aunts, including the awful Aunt Isobel, a domestic tyrant, plus a Suffragist friend of Lydia's. Add to that the whole circle around an American businessman, his daughter, her suitor, his friend and the complications that stem from them as well as from various groups of vampires, James coming off worst in a couple of encounters with the latter and also from a would-be Van Helsing. It didn't help that some of the names were too similar - Noel and Ned for example.

There was a big plot dependency on a book, the eponymous one of the title, and the various versions of it in existence and which were correct and which written by which historical character. This seems to be the Necronomicon (a key book in H P Lovecraft's fiction) of Hambly's series and if it is such a huge source of vampire mythology and vampire hunting etc it is a bit strange that it first appears so far into the series.

The story started to drag about two thirds of the way through though it did pick up towards the end. However, the motive of one of the characters love for his daughter was rather too similar to the motive of a self-sacrificing character in volume three and so the 'twist' as to why a certain person was recruiting vampires was a bit of a deja vu. Therefore only a 3 star rating and, unlike the first two in this series, not for me a 'keeper'.

Having enjoyed the first two books in this series, I anticipated another enjoyable page turner with good characterisation. Unfortunately I was underwhelmed: the plot seemed to be rather a rehash of the previous volume, with a great deal of it being a travelogue as James Asher travels across Europe in the company of Don Simon, the 16th century Spanish vampire, while Lydia Asher pours over documentation in pre-Revolution Russia to track down information on a particular woman who has vampire traits but can walk in daylight without instantly burning up.

It is understandable that Simon keeps James away from the vampires in the various cities they visit in search of information that would uncover a plot to create vampires as the perfect killing machines for the Kaiser on the brink of what became World War I given the terrible injuries James has suffered from such encounters in previous books, yet it meant that a lot of the action took place off stage with James just kept up to speed with notes Simon left for him to read in daylight. The action doesn't really take off till about two thirds through when both Ashers fall into the clutches of various villains. For me this volume was a disappointment after the suspenseful writing of the first two so I can only award it an OK read of 2 stars.

An interesting mix of the spy and vampire genres set in the early pre-WWI 20th century. There is backstory here, and I realised after a while that there must be at least one earlier volume, but the book blurb and list of author's other books gave no clue of that. Anyway, the story is self-contained so it isn't a problem.

The basic plot is the attempt by former spy James to foil an alliance between a representative of the Austrian government and a known vampire: seeing them at a train station, James buys a ticket to Paris and follows them, and a chase across Europe begins. Meanwhile, his wife Lydia, who unusually for the time is a doctor at a university hospital, is concerned after receiving a telegram from him and goes in search of a vampire, Don Simon Ysidro, a Spaniard from the days of Elizabeth I's court. She forms an uneasy alliance with him that allows her to cross Europe in pursuit of James but always too late to prevent her husband falling into traps and danger enroute.

Although there is a large cast of characters the author manages to make each of them distinctive and in several cases, quite horrible. She also makes one or two of the characters, especially the female vampire, Anthea, wife of the vampire whom James saw at the station, sympathetic despite the fact that vampires in this universe have to kill humans at least occasionally: with blood alone, they don't receive the mental energy that allows them to exercise what to us are supernatural powers such as clouding minds so that they are not perceived, and they start to lose vitality.

The few niggles that prevented the book from earning a full 5 stars are firstly a few anachronisms that were jarring to a British reader: James and Lydia are both British, their vampire ally is a Spaniard who has spent time in Britain and Europe, and yet terms such as 'sidewalk' instead of pavement, 'wire' instead of telegram, and giving the time as twenty of one instead of twenty past one have crept in. Secondly, it is a bit silly of the heroine, Lydia, to be so vain about her glasses that she is always whisking them off - if there were enemies including vampire ones lurking about, I think most people would rather keep the glasses on. Thirdly, she is rather self-serving in expecting Ysidro to refrain from killing anyone on the trip and yet be able to protect her and the travelling companion he obtains for her, in the interests of respectability - it is obvious that he is increasingly debilitated without. Considering she is eager enough for her husband to shoot someone at one point, that seems rather hypocritical. Despite all this, I found it an absorbing and exciting read with lots of suspense and vividly described settings, and have been interested enough to order books 1 and 3 of the series now that I know there are quite a few more of them.

As with volume one, on re-reading found the angst a bit wearing.

More or less standalone compared to the first two volumes. The bumbling affectations of the Antryg character and the stubborn bigotry of his enemies is rather wearing after three books.

This used to be a favourite when read years ago but when re-read, again some years back, found it and the sequel a bit wearingly angst ridden, so no longer have them.

Enjoyed this at the time, but it wasn't a 'keeper'.