Vicky Bliss

About the Vicky Bliss series

Vicky Bliss is a six-foot-tall American art historian working at a museum in Munich, whose genuine expertise in medieval and Renaissance art keeps landing her in the middle of forgery schemes, art theft, and murder across Europe. Elizabeth Peters (the pen name of Egyptologist Barbara Mertz) gives Vicky a very different voice from Amelia Peabody: funnier about her own vanity, more openly modern, and paired for most of the series with the series' real scene-stealer, the art thief and con man John Smythe -- a character so likeable in a minor role in Peters' earlier standalone The Camelot Caper that she brought him back and built a whole romantic-adventure partnership around him.

The books move from a Bavarian castle riddled with a smuggling ring, to Rome, to a fake-relics operation in a small German town, to a hunt through Sweden for looted treasure, and eventually to Egypt, as Vicky's academic career and her exasperating, unreliable, undeniably charming relationship with Smythe develop across four decades of publication. The tone sits closer to caper and romantic adventure than to strict detective fiction -- there is always a real crime and a real solution, but the pleasure is in Vicky's sharp first-person narration and the will-they-con-each-other chemistry with Smythe as much as the mystery plot itself.

At seven books across nearly forty years, it's a shorter, lighter-hearted companion to the Peabody novels, appealing to readers who want Peters' voice and art-historical detail in smaller, faster-paced doses, with a central romance that stays genuinely uncertain until deep into the series.

How to read this series

Start with Borrower of the Night (1973), the book where Vicky Bliss and John Smythe actually meet -- this is the true beginning of the series for most readers. The Camelot Caper (1969) is often listed as book 0.5 because it introduces Smythe (as 'Sir John Smythe') four years before the character reappears opposite Vicky, but Vicky herself never appears in it; it reads as a standalone Peters gothic-adventure novel and can safely be read first, last, or skipped entirely without losing anything from the Vicky Bliss books proper.

After Borrower of the Night, publication order (Street of the Five Moons, Silhouette in Scarlet, Trojan Gold, Night Train to Memphis, The Laughter of Dead Kings) tracks the Vicky-and-Smythe relationship in a straightforward forward line, with real gaps of years between books that the novels themselves lightly acknowledge. The final entry, The Laughter of Dead Kings (2008), arrived fourteen years after Night Train to Memphis and functions as a satisfying, if long-delayed, send-off.