The Thief of Shadows, a YA fantasy adventure, is the story of a teenager’s efforts to protect an ancient community of ex-slaves living for centuries below the city of New Orleans.

Kwankwu Onyewu, the Obiaman of Jamaica, stole the shadows of Kieran Renauld’s birth parents and ordered the couple to kill their only child. Before they could, Kieran was spirited away by the Ma Uati.

Ten years later, after his adoptive parents are killed in a hurricane conjured by the Obiaman, Kieran is brought to Libreville; an underground Venice of canals and tunnels beneath the city of New Orleans. The secret community, founded by the Ma Uati soon after arriving as slaves from Africa in the late 1600‘s, has thrived for four centuries - hiding from the Owners above who would enslave them, and from the Obiamen of the past who would destroy them. They protect themselves from discovery through the use of five ancient charms that only the Possessors of the Twelve Amulets may use.

Kieran, the only white person to ever live in Libreville, will now attend the Ecole de Sorts - a school that floats upon a subterranean lake, with classrooms housed within perfectly restored ships from bygone times: a Spanish Galleon, a British Man-of-War, an Arabian Ganjah, a Viking Longboat, and eight others. 

Kieran soon learns what he truly is and why he has been protected since birth. He is the last of the Rennu, the ancient protectors of the Ma Uati.

When the Obiaman unleashes the Mississippi to flood Libreville, the ships of the Ecole de Sorts manage to escape and journey to the Lac de Soleil, a Ma Uati settlement in the middle of the swamps of Louisiana.