Jacqueline Kirby

About the Jacqueline Kirby series

Jacqueline Kirby is a sharp, unglamorous, chain-smoking American librarian -- later a bestselling romance novelist -- who keeps stumbling into murders wherever her career and curiosity take her. Elizabeth Peters (the pen name of Egyptologist Barbara Mertz) built the series as something closer to a classic fair-play whodunit than her archaeological Amelia Peabody novels: closed casts, a confined setting, and a detective who solves things through close reading of people rather than physical action or romance. Jacqueline first appears working a library conference in Rome, and returns across the series at a historical-fiction convention shadowed by the ghost of Richard III's reputation, at a Harlequin-style romance writers' gathering skewering her own new profession, and finally investigating a reclusive literary legend's mysterious unfinished sequel in Appalachia.

What holds the four books together is Jacqueline's voice: dry, self-aware, entirely unbothered by not being conventionally pretty or conventionally nice, and quick to see through the vanities of the academics, writers, and literary hangers-on who populate each mystery. The settings change with her career -- library conference, historical society, romance-writing circuit, small-town publishing scandal -- but each book keeps the same tight, talky, character-driven puzzle structure.

At just four books published over seventeen years, it's Peters' smallest series, and a good pick for readers who want her plotting and wit without the decades-long commitment of Amelia Peabody.

How to read this series

Read the four Jacqueline Kirby novels in publication order, starting with The Seventh Sinner (1972). Each book is a self-contained mystery with a new setting and cast, and Jacqueline's own life advances between books (she moves from academic librarian to published romance novelist over the course of the series), so publication order both matches her personal timeline and is the only order the books were designed to be read in.

There's a seventeen-year gap between the first two books and the last two, and the tone shifts slightly as Peters' own career (and the romance-publishing industry she gently satirizes in Die for Love) evolved alongside Jacqueline's. New readers don't need any knowledge of Peters' other series to start here.