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Blake Haber

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Blake Haber

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We wove our way through clusters of the grieving until we reached a mound in the cemetery’s northwest corner, marked by a plain wooden cross. Wildflowers, abuzz with bees, grew around it. A gentle breeze carried the stench of death, mingling with the faint sweetness of the flowers.

This, I thought, was the true smell of New Orleans: sweetness and death.

New Orleans, 1853

Hiram T. Whitaker, a once-promising medical student, haunted by guilt and family tragedy, arrives in the French Quarter seeking redemption, only to find a city choking on miasma, government ineptitude, corruption, and the stink of death. Amidst the nauseating odors of the docks, children’s coffins are piled high on drays and cannon fire thunders in a desperate attempt to clear the air of pestilence.

Dependent on morphine and appalled by the region’s brutal customs, Hiram opens an unlicensed apothecary, determined to prove the superiority of modern medicine over the old, superstitious ways.

But as a devastating yellow fever epidemic ravages the city, Hiram’s rigid worldview is threatened, and he is drawn into the dangerous lives of those around him: Jerome, the enslaved man he has inherited; Charlotte, a formidable free woman of color whose practice of voodoo challenges him at every turn; and the corrupt medical establishment that controls the city.

As floodwaters rise and grief seeps into every room, the epidemic forces a reckoning with the limits of Hiram’s beliefs and the human cruelty he can no longer abide, leading him to discover that true healing demands more than science alone can provide. When he attempts a desperate act of mercy, he crosses a line he cannot uncross and plunges himself into a scandal that threatens his career—and his life.

A haunting story of medicine, magic, and belief, Hiram's Faith explores the cost of clinging to what we hold sacred, and what becomes possible when we finally let go.

Blake Haber’s day job is professional cigar roller. His fascination with New Orleans began a decade ago during a visit to a cigar factory, but it was in the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, surrounded by rectal dilators and bloodletting tools, that he turned to his partner and said, “I need to write a novel about this.”

That moment led to Hiram’s Faith, his debut novel, a Southern Gothic tale with magical realist elements set during the yellow fever epidemic of 1853.

A lifelong writer, musician, and surfer, Haber finds inspiration at the intersection of the macabre and the surreal.

He lives in Santa Barbara, California, where he is writing his second novel, set in 1970s Kyoto.

Hiram’s Faith is available in hardback, paperback, and ebook at Amazon.com.