Crimson Angel
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- USD 4.99
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- USD 4.99
Descripción editorial
Benjamin January is forced to travel to Haiti to seek his family’s lost treasure, in order to save everything he holds dear
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 triggered a savage rebellion. The world’s only Black Republic still looks with murderous mistrust upon any strangers who might set foot there, and January is in no hurry to go.
But when Vitrack is murdered, and attempts are made on January’s wife and himself, he understands that he has no choice. He must seek the treasure himself, to draw the unknown killers into the open, a bloody trail that leads first to Cuba, then to Haiti, and finally to the secret that lies buried with the accursed gold.
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Set in the summer of 1838, Hambly's scalding 13th Benjamin January novel (after 2013's Good Man Friday) takes the freed slave and Paris-trained surgeon to Cuba and Haiti, along with his beloved wife, Rose, and his white fiddler friend, Hannibal Sefton. The trip is prompted by Rose's white half-brother, Jefferson Vitrack, who appears at their New Orleans home with a mysterious tale of buried family treasure. At first, January refuses to consider pursuing the treasure, which could fund the return of thousands of slaves to Africa. But after Vitrack is murdered and Rose is attacked, January realizes that he must unravel the secret behind his brother-in-law's story. Members of January's extended family were employed by the Caribbean sugar industry, which worked thousands of malnourished black slaves to death in an average of three years each. Hambly reveals the horrors of this grim chapter of history through understated glimpses into the mind of her hero, whose silent comment on the ferocious slave uprising that established Haiti as a black republic in 1804 sums up his attitude toward the white oppressors: "They had it coming."