Nicole Peeler Books in Order

If you want the main Jane True story: Tempest Rising → Tracking the Tempest → Tempest's Legacy → Eye of the Tempest → Tempest’s Fury → Tempest Reborn
If you want a shorter taste first: Something Wikkid This Way Comes → Tempest Rising
If you want Trueniverse side stories later on: The Hound of Bar Harborville → The Ryu Morgue → Basic Incubus
If you want a different supernatural world: Jinn and Juice

Nicole Peeler was born in Aurora, Illinois, and has built a career that comfortably straddles the classroom and the fantasy shelf. She studied English literature at Boston University, earned a Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh, and later made her home in Pittsburgh while teaching writing at Seton Hill University.

Before the novels, there was the long apprenticeship of graduate school. Peeler has said that her doctoral work taught her something every working novelist needs: how to sit down, finish a huge project, revise it, and keep going after the first spark of inspiration wears off.

That discipline mattered. She has written about drafting Tempest Rising early in the morning while living in Leith, near Edinburgh, watching the sun come up over the Firth of Forth and wondering what, exactly, she was doing. A few books later, Jane True had become the center of a six-book series.

The Jane True novels, beginning with Tempest Rising, mix selkie lore, vampires, halflings, murder mysteries, romance, and a lot of sharp, self-aware humor. Readers often come for the supernatural setup, then stay for Jane herself: funny, bruised, skeptical, hungry, and never quite the polished Chosen One that fantasy sometimes likes to hand us.

Her books are urban fantasy, but not the grim, poker-faced kind. Peeler likes sex, jokes, food, and the awkwardness of real people colliding with very unreal situations. Even when the plot turns apocalyptic, the voice stays lively and personal.

Peeler once said she wanted to write a woman who becomes a hero instead of being born one.

That idea runs through Tracking the Tempest, Tempest's Legacy, Eye of the Tempest, and the later Jane books, where the magical stakes keep growing but the emotional core stays close to Jane's everyday worries, loyalties, appetites, and fear. Peeler's short Jane True pieces, including Something Wikkid This Way Comes and The Inside Man, widen that world without losing the banter or the weirdness.

She took a different route with Jinn and Juice, which opens a new urban fantasy world in Pittsburgh. Instead of coastal Maine and selkie ancestry, the book gives readers a cursed jinni, ancient Persian backstory, city magic, and a heroine counting down the last days of a thousand-year sentence. It still feels recognizably Peeler: myth pulled into the present, danger sitting beside desire, and a sense that the magical world is both funny and a little feral.

She has described urban fantasy as something close to fairy tale, a way of navigating the real world through myth. That helps explain why her novels feel grounded even when they are full of selkies, jinn, and ancient powers. The magic is flashy, but the feelings underneath are very human.

These days she lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in Seton Hill's Writing Popular Fiction program. The life on the page looks refreshingly human, too: books, teaching, essays, travel, and the kind of everyday mess that makes her fiction feel lived in.