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.