Vivian Barz Books in Order

Vivian Barz grew up on a farm in a small Northern California town with fewer than three thousand residents. It was a place with room to roam and, clearly, plenty of space for a young imagination to get busy. She began writing mysteries early, long before publishing a novel.

One of her childhood stories featured a magical scarecrow with a very unpleasant appetite. She read it aloud during a third-grade show-and-tell, and the reaction was mixed. It was an early lesson in putting a strange idea on the page and letting readers decide what they think.

She kept writing.

Barz later studied English and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. Those interests make sense alongside her fiction, which often moves with the direct momentum of a crime story while making room for unsettling images and paranormal questions.

Her mystery debut, Forgotten Bones, arrived in 2019. It introduced Officer Susan Marlan and college professor Eric Evans, an unlikely pair pulled into a murder investigation in the small California town of Perrick. Susan does not accept the easiest answer, while Eric has visions he initially believes are connected to his schizophrenia. The books use that uncertainty to keep both the characters and readers asking what is real.

The story continued in Hidden Bones and Campus Bones, the later entries in the Dead Remaining series. Susan and Eric face new cases in isolated towns, woods, and on a university campus, with missing people, buried secrets, and clues that do not fit neatly into a police report. The ongoing relationship between their personal lives and their investigations is part of the series' pull.

Barz also writes Her Last Eclipse, which launches a separate case for Louisiana private investigator Bobbi McCoy. It shifts from paranormal-tinged police work to a tougher private-eye investigation, but the pressure stays the same: a determined investigator has to keep going when official answers are incomplete.

The mystery is never quite as simple as it first looks.

She has also written under the pen name Sloan Archer, including the Montgomery's Vampires books. Across both names, her work moves between mystery, thriller, romance, and paranormal fiction. That range gives her room to return to crime-solving while following an idea wherever it leads.

Barz has been based in California and has described herself as always at work on the next screenplay and book. Her early love of film remains a useful thread through her career. The stories may bring ghosts, violence, and difficult cases into the frame, but they stay focused on people trying to sort truth from fear.