The Living Blood » (Reprint)

Tananarive Due is an award-winning Essence best-selling author of Blood Colony, Living Blood, Good House, and Joplin's Ghost. She lives in Southern California with her husband Steven Barnes. Visit her website at www.TananariveDue.com.

Acclaimed for her riveting fiction, which tests the boundaries of supernatural suspense, Tanarive Due returns with a gloriously imagined tale of an ancient cult's undying powers—now embodied by a child who can grow to become either monster or savior.

Jessica Jacobs-Wolde worked hard to rebuild her life in Maimi after the disappearance of her husband, David, and the death of her daughter Kira at his hand. Four years later, she is still coming to terms with a shocking truth: David, who is part of an ancient group of immortals—a hidden African clan that has survived for more than a thousand years—gave Jessica and their second daughter, Fana, the gift of his healing blood.

Now Jessica is running an isolated clinic in Botswana—one that has swiftly earned a reputation for its astounding success rate in curing desperately ill children—and she hopes to find the tribe of souls with whom Fana truly belongs. Just three and a half years old, the girl is displaying signs of tremendous power—conjuring storms, editing her mother's memories, and striking people down with a thought. Her growing abilities need to be tamed—and soon. Already Fana's dreams are haunted by a shadowy entity, someone—or something—she can only call the Bee Lady.

Unaware that they are being tracked by Lucas Shepard, a doctor from Florida who hopes to save his dying son, and by a group of fortune hunters who will stop at nothing to exploit the power coursing through her veins, Jessica journeys to Ethiopia in search of the Life Brothers. There, she will be reunited with her immortal beloved. There, the full force of Fana's powers will be revealed. And there, Jessica,David, Fana, and the good doctor Shepard, though himself a mere mortal, will engage in an epic and transcontinental battle over the ultimate fate of humanity.

Blending the supernatural with a thrilling vision of our times, this is a powerful and sweeping tale oflove, horror, immortality, and redemption from an astounding storyteller.

Publishers Weekly

Like the hurricane that threatens Florida at its climax, this stunning sequel to My Soul to Keep (1997) is an event of sustained power and energy. Its predecessor introduced Jessica Jacob-Wolde, a journalist who belatedly discovers that her "perfect" husband, David, is a renegade from a secretive 1,000-year-old clan of Ethiopian immortals who will kill to prevent members from sharing their life-extending blood with mortals. David has returned to Africa to do penance among his Life Brothers, and Jessica, whom he resurrected from the dead with a transfusion from himself, follows close behind, setting up a jungle clinic to dispense dilutions of her blood as medicine. Jessica's daughter Fana, whom David did not know Jessica was pregnant with when he transfused her, has begun to show magical powers, and her precocious divinity is the catalyst for a volatile brew of subplots that includes a violent schism among the Life Brothers, an alternative medicine guru's desperate efforts to save his leukemic son with Jessica's blood and a force of unspeakable evil trying to channel itself through Fana. Due exercises assured control over her wildly gyrating story, exploring its drama in terms of African culture, African-American experience and a variety of parent-child relationships. What's more, she fuses clich d themes from a variety of genres jungle adventure, transcontinental espionage, natural disaster into an amalgam that reclaims their powers to excite. A rare example of a sequel that improves upon the original, this novel also should set a standard for supernatural thrillers of the new millennium. Agent, Jack Hawkins. (Apr. 10) Forecast: My Soul to Keep was one of the most talked-about debuts in the horror field since the advent of Stephen King. Expect heavy interest and like sales for this sequel. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.