Jewell Parker Rhodes, Yellow Moon

Yellow Moon

Jewell Parker Rhodes

Washington Square (Pocket), Aug 2009, $15.00

ISBN: 9781416537113

In New Orleans, Dr. Marie Laveau works the emergency room at Charity Hospital. The single mom tries to balance her medical charity work in ER with being a single mom raising a child Marie-Claire and a "Kind Dog" with time for herself. She especially enjoys jazz at the clubs. However, she also has a legacy that she would prefer to ignore but her heightened sense of responsibility never allows her to do so. As a blood relative of the legendary Voodoo Queen whose surname she shares, Marie watches out for supernatural evil to prevent tragedies.

Thus she cannot ignore the murders of three seemingly different people; each had their blood drained and their necks contained three teeth like puncture marks. She fears, a wazimamoto African vampire is stalking the city while the victims remain restless wandering the streets. With NOPD Detective Daniel Parks; her Creole boss Dr. Louis DuLac; her daughter and others, Marie knows she must stop the predator before the monster consumes enough blood to look human.

Yellow Moon is an exhilarating gritty urban fantasy that connects African vampirism with jazz and de facto racism. The story line is tense and gripping but especially fresh with a different perspective on the blood suckers, but definitely not a rehash of Blacula. Instead this deep New Orleans thriller is based on the premise of a deadly angry non-western African vampire who reacts to cultural racism, but must be stopped by Marie and her allies.

Harriet Klausner