The Auctioneer's Complexion

About this book

In 1843 New Orleans, Augustin Mercier is one of the French Quarter's most successful slave auctioneers, a white Creole gentleman of impeccable pedigree—on paper. In truth he is the son of a plaçage arrangement, kept white by arsenic powder, strategic marriages, and eighteen years of buried witnesses. When his dying half-sister Céleste threatens to expose his birth certificate unless he frees her twelve-year-old son Lucien—a boy who shares Augustin's telltale complexion—Augustin arranges a paper sale meant to quietly deliver the boy to freedom. The scheme collapses, Lucien disappears upriver into the plantation parishes, and Augustin must chase one enslaved child through cane country without betraying why he cares. At home, his pregnant wife Adèle commissions a genealogist to build the family a crest, and every document she uncovers threatens the fiction he has murdered to protect, while a rival auctioneer begins to study his strange trading patterns. Across one year of bargains, confessions, and compromises, Augustin is pulled toward a reckoning he cannot purchase: a wake in a cane field where the name he has refused to speak for eighteen years—his mother's—must finally be said aloud. A story of inheritance, erasure, and whether a legacy built on ash can ever be anything else.

Book details

Genres:

Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Southern Gothic, Psychological Drama

Language:

en

Published:

2026-07-21

Content rating:

R