Jewell Parker Rhodes

Twelve-year-old Jerome is shot by a police officer who mistakes his toy gun for a real threat. As a ghost, he observes the devastation that's been unleashed on his family and community in the wake of what they see as an unjust and brutal killing.

In 1870, Reconstruction brings big changes to the Louisiana sugar plantation where spunky ten-year-old Sugar has always lived, including changes to her friendship with Billy, the son of her former master, and the arrival of workmen from China.

Visiting her grandmother in the Louisiana bayou, ten-year-old Maddy begins to realize that she may be the only sibling to carry on the gift of her family's magical legacy.

Jewell Parker Rhodes follows up her acclaimed Voodoo Dreams with a present-day mystery surrounding the gifts of an ancestor of the Voodoo Queen. Doctor Marie Levant can't explain why she's drawn to New Orleans, why it's comforting and unsettling at the same time. And she can't shake her haunting dreams. But when she delivers a dead woman's baby, Marie knows malevolent forces are at work-and it's up to her to stop them.

The second novel in Jewell Parker Rhodes' acclaimed Voodoo series, Yellow Moon finds New Orleans' preeminent voodoo practitioner hunting an African vampire -a wazimamoto. Marie Levant is tired of seeing corpses drained of blood arrive at the hospital each night, and tired of being haunted by their ghosts. It'll take all her skills to expel the deadly spirit.

Rhodes reinvents the lives of Frederick Douglass and the two women who loved him and lived in his shadow. All the fiery emotions of passion, jealousy, and resentment churn and boil to the surface as the women discover an uneasy solidarity in their shared love for him.