Voodoo Season: A Marie Laveau Mystery

A sequel to Voodoo Dreams finds Marie Levant beginning her medical residency in New Orleans's Charity Hospital in the wake of culture shock and increasingly violent dreams, which give way to an awareness of her ancestral heritage as an African and a voodoo queen. 25,000 first printing.

From Publishers Weekly

Medicine and voodoo may seem at odds, but Marie Levant, first-year resident at New Orleans's Charity Hospital, discovers she has a gift for more than one kind of healing. Rhodes develops this theme to full advantage in her second book (after Voodoo Dreams) about this descendant of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen. Strange forces are at work in the humid heat, and Marie is plagued by disturbing dreams and the sense that she has lived this life before. She employs her inner strength and feminist powers in pursuit of the murderer of the gentle and handsome young man who shared her bed one evening, awakening feelings she had too long ignored. Marie's mother fled to Chicago when she was small and cleaned houses to survive. When the mother died mysteriously, the daughter went into foster care. Events intensify with Marie's delivery of a dead girl's living baby. She feels herself the mother and resolves to find the baby's origins. Rhodes's tale of spiritual empowerment and prophetic vision reveals the practice of voodoo as good as well as evil. Nonbelievers along with the initiated will be riveted throughout. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Rhodes portrayed the revered and feared nineteenth-century New Orleans voodoo queens, Marie Laveau and her daughter of the same name, with insight and lyricism in her debut novel, Voodoo Dreams (1993). Here she launches a mystery trilogy about the voodoo queens' present-day descendant. Orphaned as a girl in Chicago, this Marie is unaware of her spiritual inheritance. All she knows is that she felt compelled to become a doctor and move to New Orleans. Now, as she puzzles over what happened to the beautiful young women of mixed race who are showing up in the ER apparently dead and certainly pregnant, she is assailed by frightening, otherworldly visions. Rhodes revels in the sensuality and danger of this storied town in an erotic, easily consumed tale as her plucky would-be doctor turns voodoo sleuth attuned to gods, ghosts, and villains. Regrettably, Rhodes verges on voodoo-lite in scenes redolent of campy Hollywood; nevertheless, Marie's world of sex, malevolence, the undead, and miraculous rescue is alluring. Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Jewell Parker Rhodes is a professor of creative writing and American literature at Arizona State University.

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