Hurricane is the conclusion to US author Jewell Parker Rhodes’s award-winning Voodoo-inspired mystery trilogy. Dr Marie Levant is the great-great granddaughter of Marie Laveau, the 19th-century Voodoo queen in the first of the trilogy, historical novel Voodoo Dreams. Levant has achieved fame herself after saving New Orleans from a vampire. Now, as she searches for answers to some strange deaths in a backwater town, a hurricane threatens to break the levees of Louisiana. Rhodes weaves the themes of medicine, shamanism, corporate crime and environmental devastation into a spine-tingling mystery.

Rhodes will be speaking about her first children’s novel, Ninth Ward, also based on the events of Hurricane Katrina, at a second festival event. Her adult books, including Voodoo Dreams and Douglass Women, have won awards such as the American Book Award and the Black Caucus of the American Library Award for Literary Excellence.