Barbara Michaels

Barbara Michaels is the primary suspense pen name of Barbara Mertz (1927-2013), the American Egyptologist who also wrote the Amelia Peabody and Vicky Bliss mysteries as Elizabeth Peters. Where the Peters novels lean toward wit and archaeological adventure, the 29 novels published as Michaels are quieter and more unsettling: gothic suspense built around old houses, family secrets, and the possibility -- never quite confirmed, never quite denied -- of the supernatural. Ammie, Come Home (1968), her second book under the name, set the template and became a genre landmark, a Georgetown ghost story credited with helping define modern American gothic suspense alongside writers like Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney. Mertz held a PhD in Egyptology from the University of Chicago, a background that surfaces less directly in the Michaels novels than in the Peters books but still informs their interest in the past pressing in on the present. Nearly all of the Michaels novels are freestanding, though a few -- Ammie, Come Home, Shattered Silk, and Stitches in Time among them -- share a Georgetown house and loose connective tissue of setting and minor characters. Her heroines are typically smart, independent professional women -- academics, antique dealers, textile conservators -- isolated in a house with a history, piecing together old wrongs while present danger closes in. Mertz died in 2013, having published across both names for over four decades.