Elizabeth Peters

Elizabeth Peters was the pen name of Barbara Mertz, an American author with a PhD in Egyptology who used that academic background to write the Amelia Peabody series, following a formidable Victorian Egyptologist and her family through decades of archaeological adventure and murder mystery in and around real excavation sites in Egypt. Beginning with Crocodile on the Sandbank in 1975, the series is beloved for its blend of genuine Egyptological detail, sharp comic dialogue, and a slow-building romantic and family saga involving Amelia, her husband Radcliffe Emerson, and their equally strong-willed son Ramses.

Mertz also wrote widely acclaimed mystery and suspense novels as Barbara Michaels, and nonfiction on ancient Egypt under her own name, giving her three distinct but overlapping bodies of work across a long career. As Elizabeth Peters specifically, she was a foundational figure in the historical-mystery-with-archaeology subgenre and received numerous lifetime achievement honors from mystery-writer organizations. New readers should start with Crocodile on the Sandbank, since the Peabody-Emerson family's relationships and running jokes develop continuously across the series' roughly twenty novels, several of which move around within the family's internal chronology rather than strict publication order. No film or television adaptation exists to date. Peters died in 2013; the series is complete.