Diana Tregarde

About the Diana Tregarde series

Diana Tregarde writes romance novels for a living and works as a Guardian — one of a small number of psychically gifted people who quietly hold the line against supernatural threats — on the side. Each of the three novels drops her into a different American setting and a different flavor of horror: Burning Water has her tracking an Aztec blood-god being summoned in modern Dallas by a killer re-enacting ancient sacrifice rituals; Children of the Night is set in 1970s Greenwich Village, where Diana investigates a string of murders tied to a vampire and the era's occult subculture; Jinx High moves to an Oklahoma high school where a teenage sorceress with real power is destroying classmates who cross her, forcing Diana to intervene before the girl does permanent damage.

Written before "urban fantasy" was a codified marketing category, the trilogy is an early example of the genre's now-familiar shape: a modern American setting, occult forces hiding just under the surface of ordinary life, and a courageous, wisecracking woman equipped with real magic to stop them. The books share Diana as protagonist but are otherwise self-contained, each built around a single case with its own villain, cast, and resolution.

How to read this series

Publication order is the practical default, though the books are loosely connected rather than serialized — each is a self-contained investigation, and reading them out of order costs you very little. Some readers prefer internal chronological order instead, since Children of the Night is set roughly a decade before the other two (in the early-to-mid 1970s) despite being published second: read Children of the Night, then Burning Water, then Jinx High if you'd rather follow Diana's life in the order she lived it. Either approach works equally well; this guide lists publication order as the default because that's how the books were packaged and are still most commonly sold.