Bestselling author Barbara Hambly's A Free Man of Color and Fever Season established Benjamin January as one of mystery's most exciting heroes. Now he returns in a powerful new novel, a sensual mosaic of old New Orleans, where cultures clash and murder can hover around every darkened corner....
It is St. John's Eve in the summer of 1834 when Benjamin January—Creole physician and music teacher—is shattered by the news that...

A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East. In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant―the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed,...

Valinda Lacy's mission is to help the newly emancipated survive and flourish in post-Civil War New Orleans. When thugs destroy her school and target her, she runs for her life--into the arms of Captain Drake LeVeq. An architect from an old New Orleans family, Drake admires Valinda's determination but when her father demands she return home to marry another man, her daring rebellion draws Drake into an irresistible intrigue.

Ruby Bridges recounts the story of her involvement, as a six-year-old, in the integration of her school in New Orleans in 1960.

For months six-year-old Ruby Bridges must confront the hostility of white parents when she becomes the first African American girl to integrate Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960.

"When Ruby Bridges was six years old, she became the first African American student to integrate an elementary school in the South. Told in the perspective of her six year old self and based on the pivotal events that happened in 1960, Ruby tells her story like never before. Embracing her name and learning that even at six years old she was able to pave the path for future generations, this is a story full of hope, innocence, and courage."--

"Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations to the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of these chilling transactions into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter...

"Florestine Perrault Collins (1895-1988) lived a fascinating and singular life. She came from a Creole family that had known privileges before the Civil War, privileges that largely disappeared in the Jim Crow South. She learned photographic techniques while passing for white. She opened her first studio in her home, and later moved her business to New Orleans?s black business district. Fiercely independent, she ignored convention by moving out of...