Customer Reviews

Rebels of Babylon (Abel Jones Mysteries)

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Owen Parry's *Rebels of Babylon* is a delight. This is the sixth in the award-winning Abel Jones series of Civil War mysteries, and the author continues to spin satisfying stories in remarkably vivid prose.

*Rebels of Babylon* unfolds in the streets of wartime New Orleans with all its riddles, enchantments, and frights. In each of the Abel Jones mysteries, Owen Parry has taken the reader to new landscapes and outposts of the war, educating as well as entertaining us. His portrayal of the people and scenes of Civil War New Orleans is fascinating, as we follow the hero through many twists and narrow escapes. Parry gives us the smells and tastes and textures of the city and the port, and leads us by the hand from the darkness of nighttime voodoo rituals into even more chilling incidents in the light of day.

Just as the descriptions are colorful and the characters are lively, the story itself is intriguing. Sent to investigate a murder, Abel finds both familiar and unfathomable motives at its heart.

As with the other Abel Jones mysteries, this one comes full circle. No loose ends are left untied, and no aspect of the story seems unnatural -- although in the course of the tale we encounter plenty of unnatural scenes and moments! Another aspect of the book (and the series) that I particularly enjoyed was watching the continued development of the main character. This isn't quite the same Abel Jones we first encountered in *Faded Coat of Blue*. Abel's experiences have changed him in subtle, interesting ways.

Those who've read previous Abel Jones mysteries will find their expectations met or exceeded by *Rebels of Babylon*, and for those who are new to the series, I think this installment will make you want to read the earlier books too. One caution bears repeating: Expect to encounter language and attitudes of the 1860s, not the early 21st century.

It's good to know that such great writing has found the commercial success necessary to keep the series going. Now that we've seen wartime New Orleans, I wonder where Owen and Abel will take us next. I heartily recommend *Rebels of Babylon* to fans of mystery.

New Orleans, 1863: the Civil War is raging, controversial Union General Benjamin Butler has just turned over his post to his successor, blacks are disappearing from their neighborhoods, horrific murders are occurring, voodoo ceremonies are taking place in the countryside, and terror is everywhere. Some white "philanthropists" have established a program for sending blacks back to a welcoming Africa, but many former slaves wish to stay in New Orleans. Both blacks and whites are terrified at what the future may hold.

Into this milieu comes Abel Jones, a major in the Union army who came to the US from Wales, by way of India, and whose rigorous moral code has brought him to the attention of President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln has asked him to investigate the death of Susan Peabody, the abolitionist daughter of a wealthy northerner. Abel believes that she has been murdered, though no one knows a specific motive. Jones, the often dour hero of five previous Parry mysteries, is a fascinating character, and in this novel he continues to grow, showing far more emotion than he has in the past and far more flexibility in his interpretation of his religious duties as a devout Methodist.

Author Parry's considerable research into the New Orleans setting of 1863 is smoothly incorporated as he makes the city come alive in all the tumult of its mid-Civil War upheavals. His greatest skill, however, is in creating a fast pace in which one sensational event succeeds another at a never-slackening speed. Much of the mystery is connected to the Creoles' voodoo beliefs and voodoo ceremonies, which Parry describes in gruesome and gory detail, while Abel tries to connect events to missing Negroes and Susan Peabody's death. During his investigations, Abel runs afoul of some of the army officers who are supposed to be maintaining public order, and when he uncovers the theft of a huge sum of money entrusted to the army, his life is endangered.

Filling the novel with details and events guaranteed to excite the reader, including macabre deaths and torture not for the faint of heart, he appeals to the reader's emotions, sometimes creating scenes that are over-the-top in their sensationalism. "More is more" here, and subtlety is not an objective, once the action gets going. Written with immense narrative brio, this novel, like the others in the Abel Jones series is a carefully researched entertainment, rather than "serious literature." Parry's goal is to keep readers on the edges of their chairs, and he totally succeeds in this, his best novel to date. Mary Whipple

It's early 1863, and the Southern city of New Orleans is under Federal control. Major Abel Jones is sent there to investigate the murder of the daughter of a prominent Northern politico, but this seemingly simple case turns extremely complicated. By the time the novel is done, there are more killings, kidnappings, fires, deceptions, etc., than could possibly populate three other books.Through it all our intrepid hero strives to maintain his stiff feeling of dignity and religious morality, although they are sorely tested in this type of setting. I believe that this series grows stronger with each new book, and I eagerly await the next installment of Jones' adventures!

The fly leaf of Rebels of Babylon refers to the opening scene as a "tour de force of mayhem." Certainly, Owen Parry is an excellent action writer, but his real forte is characterization. There is no more well-rounded character in American mystery writing than Abel Jones.

Jones is a staunch Methodist, who reads his Bible every day, when he's not chasing voodoo priestesses through the streets of New Orleans. He's also equally dismissive of just about every nationality other than the Welsh. Jones's blind spots set him up for a lot of introspection as the plot winds toward its climax.

In this sixth number in the series, Jones is sent to New Orleans to investigate the murder of abolitionist Susan Peabody who was involved in a "Back-to-Africa" scheme, having invested over $150,000 of her own money. Jones is aided in the endeavor by Mr. Barnaby, a character first introduced in CALL EACH RIVER JORDAN. All of the other familiar minor characters are mentioned only referentially.

I didn't care much for the plot. Let it suffice to say that there's a lot of B-movie voodoo involved. At one point a lamb is skinned alive by a voodoo zombie, and in the same scene Jones participates in a voodoo mass. The voodoo participants seem to be both good and bad, and I never was able to figure out what their motivation was.

Plot is never the point in one of Parry's Civil War mysteries. A blurb in the back of the book refers to Abel T. Jones as "a character with a voice nearly the equal, in originality, of Twain's immortal Huck Finn." Listen to this: "I leaped like an Irish girl at the sound of the fiddle." Another character is bleeding "like an Irishman's `eart at the sight of an empty bottle." When he is confronted with a voodoo chant, Jones says the chant did not "resemble anything Charles Wesley wrote." Most often the joke is on Abel Jones and that makes it okay when he's overzealous about his religion or makes sport of the French. An Irish cab driver refers to Jones as a runt with "that low, Welsh look." You don't find these treasures once or twice in a book; they're on every other page. Perhaps the funniest scene in the whole book is when General Banks reads Jones the riot act. Because of the mayhem at the beginning of the book, Banks thinks Jones is a total screw-up, just the opposite of the way Jones sees himself.

Throughout the book, Jones is complaining about how much he wants to resign his commission and return to his expectant wife, Mary Myfanwy, and their two children in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. This subplot comes to a head in the epilogue when Jones reports to Henry Seward. That's another staple in the Abel Jones series. We're always introduced to a historical figure or two along the way. Again Jones is confronted by an entirely different perception of his personality. Seward thinks Jones would make an excellent politician.

Wryly, dryly witty and often hilarious, with a colorful, multi-layered setting, and a delightfully over-the-top plot, narrated by a sharp, determined, bull-headed Welshman, (ably assisted and often rescued by his infinitely more flexible, practical sidekick, Barnaby B. Barnaby), this sixth Abel Jones novel has everything going for it.

A straight-laced Methodist might feel a bit out of his element in roiling, seething, party-loving 1863 New Orleans. But Major Jones doesn't permit himself much self-doubt or uncertainty. Sent by President Lincoln to solve the murder of an abolitionist do-gooder in the Union-occupied city, Jones plunges into the fray from the first page, chasing a black voodoo priestess with a large snake out of a convent and through the unfamiliar, treacherous streets.

He's not quite sure what the chase is about, since the nun who raised the alarm spoke only French, and he never does catch the woman. Quite the opposite. The woman disappears and Jones finds himself cornered by three thugs on a rooftop. He fights them off and makes his escape only to be ambushed in a bawdy house, knocked out with ether and entombed. Literally. "I had been buried alive. Shut in with bones and rot and rags, piled up so high they pressed me against the roof of the narrow crypt....My final breaths would be fumes off rotting corpses. The thought put my lingering toothache in its place."

The toothache will return, though, to hilarious and horrific effect, culminating in a visit to a sadistic dentist with, unknown to Jones, rebel sympathies. After the initial poking and prodding, the slovenly dentist produces a bottle of whisky:

" `I have taken the pledge, sir,' I told him, not without a certain regret.
He fortified himself with a swig from the bottle....He chose a tool that might have done for a blacksmith's shop....I tasted metal. And rust."

The "embarrassed" (naked) corpse is the daughter of a prominent northerner and it's not long before Jones has received several wildly differing views of her. Was she plain or beautiful? Naïve or scheming? Prude or libertine? Racist and mean, or principled and generous?

Jones had not been pleased to be handed this case - "in the midst of so much death I cared little for Miss Peabody, who was unknown to me." And his inadvertent plunge into voodoo distracts him further. Racial tension is high in New Orleans where blacks are newly freed and their former masters have lost their freedom and much of their fortune to Yankee victors. Many former slaves have gone missing and there are rumors of mass murder, and resurrected dead. Uncertainty and fear run rampant.

Jones makes his way through New Orleans society, gathering mostly cryptic information from the powerful of both races. Against his God-fearing will, to unravel the mysteries - the missing blacks, Miss Peabody's death, and several more gruesome murders and abductions - Jones undergoes an elaborate, terrifying voodoo ritual. Voodoo, though he cannot believe in it, lays a pall of dread and mystery over the city.

His colleagues, the occupying soldiers, are not much help either. The new commanding general is a politician unwilling to rock the boat and the rich-boy officer assigned to Jones is a dolt. Jones, having been a soldier for many years, is sometimes caustic about his colleagues:

"When you strip off an officer's uniform, you always find him smaller than he seemed. Generals are especially diminished."

When the general dismisses a servant offering coffee, Jones observes, "I would have valued a steaming cup myself. But generals assume that, if they do not want a thing, no one else wants it either."

Eventually Jones, with Barnaby's considerable and not always appreciated aid, unravels the complex threads of the mysteries, leaving none dangling. He keeps the action going, and mixed with scenes of high hilarity are others so grisly and cruel, they'll take your breath away. Jones himself develops as a man during the course of the story as he has over the course of the series.

Parry's portrait of New Orleans, in all its warts and diamonds and fake tiaras, plunges the reader into this tumultuous and ugly period. And you couldn't ask for a more observant, intrepid and witty guide than Abel Jones.

There are a lot of books dealing fictionally with the Civil War. Many of them have memorable characters and not a few of them are set dramatically against the backdrop of the great events of that era. Owen Parry has carved out a niche for himself as probably the best writer of mysteries set during the Civil War. This sixth book in his series following Union Army officer Abel Jones is one of the best so far.

It's interesting to note that Owen Parry is the pen name of Ralph Peters, a military novelist who's made a pretty good name for himself with novels about our modern military. Peters started out an enlisted man, and was promoted to officer after a few years in the ranks. He was raised in the same region of Pennsylvania Jones lives in, and has some of the same ancestry. Though he wasn't born in Wales, as Jones was, you get the feeling that this lets him create Jones' character more fully, and more believably.

Jones is a wonderful character. For those who aren't familiar, being a creature of the 19th Century, he's very devoutly religious, and only swears when he's under considerable pressure. He never tells you exactly what he said though: he's too embarrassed. He's devoted to his wife, loves his children (the second one is born during this book) and is for the most part devoted to the Union cause. Since being wounded at First Bull Run, however, he can't serve in the field because he needs a cane to walk, due to a severe limp. This led to him being assigned to "other duties", which entailed him being sent to investigate various goings on that drew the suspicion of the authorities in Washington. Essentially, he's a CID investigator, before the organization existed. Sort of a 19th Century JAG or NCIS type, but for the army.

The current book has Jones sent to New Orleans in 1863, to discover how an idealistic young woman who went there to teach slaves to read could have wound up dead, floating in the Mississippi, with her clothes in "disarray". This implies that either she was engaged in immoral activities, or raped (almost as bad as the first among the hoi polloi in that era). Since her father is very politically well-connected and important in the North, Jones is tapped by the President and Secretary Stanton to investigate, and bring the perpetrators to justice.

I enjoyed this book a great deal, and would recommend it to anyone interested in the Civil War. In addition to everything else, this is the best character, in terms of the dialect he narrates the story to you in, since George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series. Wonderful books.

Owen Parry's "Rebels of Babylon", an "Abel Jones" Civil War mystery novel, is a slam-bang pageturner, with an opening sequence worthy of Indiana Jones. Owen Parry's characters may tend to be rather larger than life, not exactly fully-realized and three-dimensional, although he constructs an exciting plot against a vivid but nonetheless authentic background. Unlike so many "historical" novelists, Parry does not create a tale set in a thinly-disguised modern world. The situations and characters in his novels are genuinely from the mid-Nineteenth century. Abel Jones, a Welsh-born veteran of Britain's wars in India and now a Union officer, disabled from further field service by an injury suffered at First Bull Run, is a reluctant but not wholly untalented detective in the services of the Lincoln Administration, dragged into investigating politcally sensitive crimes. This later adventure brings him to exotic New Orleans, once again in Union hands. Jones is a stiff-necked, moralizing Methodist who is hard on those who do not live up to his high standards (but, to be fair, he is equally hard on himself) and much of the humor in the books stems from juxtaposing Jones's self-perception against reality. Jones is true to his times, filled with the prejudices and assumptions of his class. He is not a terribly genial companion, perhaps, but he is admirable for his dedication and integrity.

I think it best to read the Abel Jones novels in published order (the first was "Faded Coat of Blue"), as Jones's life does evolve over the course of the series and eventually characters from earlier volumes do reappear and passing references are made to past adventures.

This is a marvelous read, and those already familiar with the Abel Jones series will not be disappointed. Again, I am amazed and appreciative of the amount of research that Mr. Parry puts into his novels, and this book is a prime example. It is a wonderful story that not only entertains, but also enlightens about one of the most important eras in our history, and, one of the most important cities and cultures (New Orleans) in our country. I couldn't put it down and read it all in one sitting. Thank again to the author, and I look forward to reading about how the venerable Abel Jones will come to grips with his latest personal struggle regarding family over duty!

Usual Owen Parry protagonist Abel Jones finds himself in war ravaged 1863 New Orleans investigating a murder. Jones, a major in the Union Army has been commissioned by none other than President Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward to unravel the mystery of the death of young abolitionist Susan Peabody. Peabody's father was a powerful Northern industrialist with immense political clout and therfore worthy of placation.

Jones was stonewalled in his inquest due to the wide variety of beliefs exhibited by the denizens of New Orleans including formerly prominent citizens and newly freed slaves. The tenets of voodoo were prevalent and the Negro and Creole populations were leary of Union soldiers. Jones received much needed assistance from a former compatriot and ex-haberdasher Barnaby B. Barnaby a colorful character able to gain entrance into enclaves tabooed to Jones. Barnaby's dearly departed wife was of mixed heritage and this enabled him to be accepted by all levels of society.

Jones and Barnaby painstakingly amassed enough evidence to uncover a plot that distorted abolitionist Peabody's idea to return the freed slaves, by ship, back to their roots in Africa. The guilty parties not only stole the $150,000 earmarked for her plan but actually gathered up the freed slaves and sold them back into slavery in Spanish held territories.

Parry's descriptive narration of the tumultuous setting that existed during the war in New Orleans greatly aids in this appealing historical fictitious offering. Parry populated his fiction with a wide array of interesting characters representative of all walks of life, as Jones tries to make sense of all that he discovers.

If you're one of those folks who thinks reading just "ain't real enough" life for you, and you fill your days and nights with wheel barrel haulin' of half decayed tree bark and wormy soil to make yourself feel useful to God and country. Well then I feel mighty sorry for you. You are missing out on one of the true treasures of Americana by not reading Owen Parry's mystery novels of the "War of Noth'ron Aggression"; the master of the genre. I'm not going into a synopsis of the novel, that's already done here times over, but suffice it to say the book put a big smile on my face as I clutched it to my bosom after each session of reading. Parry's other novels were wonders, especially "Call Each River Jordan", but this latest will have you marveling over each sentence like it's a snifter of Highland Scotch after a morning in the pews with "polite society". Such clever goodness from the sad dark of the Civil War. Thank you Owen Parry. I sweep off my dusty brimmed hat, bowing in antique gestures to your fabulous skills and joyous imaginings with English words and letters. Sheer genius.