The Benjamin January mysteries are set in and around New Orleans during the 1830s and 1840s, and focus primarily on the free black community which existed at that time and place.
[1] Seven books in the series (Fever Season,[2] Dead Water,[3] The Shirt on His Back,[4] Ran Away,[5] Good Man Friday,[6] Crimson Angel,[7] and Drinking Gourd [8]) have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly.
Each title is an entertaining murder mystery with a complex plot and well-developed characters, and each explores many aspects of Creole society.
However, most tend to emphasize some particular element of antebellum Louisiana life, such as Voodoo religion (Graveyard Dust), opera and music (Die Upon a Kiss), the annual epidemics of yellow fever and malaria (Fever Season), fear of miscegenation (Dead and Buried), or the harsh nature of commercial sugar production (Sold Down the River).
Important themes running throughout the series are 1) the cultural clash between the rising Protestant English-speaking Anglo-Americans on the one hand and the declining Catholic, French-speaking Creoles on the other, 2) the extreme regard of Creole society for "how" colored a person is (quite alien to modern readers), 3) January's bitterness at the many forms of racial injustice he observes, 4) the complex, partially race-based sexual politics of colonial French society, and 5) January's ongoing attempts to balance the primal, open, and frank African outlook acquired in his early childhood with the more restrained and rational European worldview he now holds.