Burning Water by Mercedes Lackey
Mercedes Lackey is best known for her VALDEMAR series, a multi-volume epic fantasy that is beloved by many fantasy readers. Some of Lackey’s legions of fans may not know that she also published an urban fantasy trilogy back in the late 80s and early 90s. It stars Diana Tregarde, a romance writer and practicing witch who solves magical murders and helps protect the world from evil supernatural beings. She is a Guardian.
In the first DIANA TREGARDE novel, Burning Water (1989), we meet Diana after her friend Mark Valdez, a police detective, asks for her help with a case. It involves the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, a photographer for a travel magazine, a fashion designer, four beautiful models, a serial killer, and mutilations of cattle. As they do the gumshoeing, asking all the weirdos they know about any supernatural goings-on, Diana and Mark, who happens to be a medium, eventually discover that an ancient Aztec god is involved. Tension escalates as the murders become more and more brazen. The Aztec god must be defeated.
Burning Water features likeable characters and is often entertaining despite some parts where the plot is predictable. There are several slow spots as Lackey gives us too much insight and background on the murder victims who are dispatched immediately after we learn about them. Also annoying is Lackey’s tendency (I’ve mentioned it many times before) to give us information by having her characters think it. I find this unnatural and clunky and it grates on my nerves, but not enough to keep me from continuing to read Lackey’s work.
Set in the late 1980s, Burning Water has a nostalgic feel for those of us who are old enough to remember that era. There is no internet or cell phones but there are ashtrays, modems, darkrooms, floppy disks, research excursions to the public library, sunken living rooms, valium, long distance phone calls, yuppies, newspaper vending machines, and AIDS. (Diana has a friend who suffers from AIDS and Lackey deals sensitively with this issue.)
Burning Water was interesting and entertaining enough to make me want to read the next DIANA TREGARDE book, Children of the Night. I’m reading Tantor Media’s new audio editions. Traci Odom was a good choice for narrator and gives a nice performance.
[…] Nostalgia: Readers find themselves longing for their lost childhood innocence, much like rediscovering an old photograph in a dusty…
I really enjoyed this book. The lack of melodrama (as "plot") was a feature, not a bug, I think. Parts…
good points Mariion-. I actually had meant to talk about the ham radio but the review was getting long (I…
You got your review up before I could even write one. I loved this book--one of my favorite reads of…
Hey, any book with a ghost, a goat girl AND a vampire can't be all bad, right?