Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau (Paris, 7th June 1957), known by the pseudonym Fred Vargas, is a French writer, archaeozoologist and medievalist, and author of crime fiction novels. The daughter of writer Philippe Audoin (surrealist, a friend of Breton), she has a twin sister, Jo Vargas, who is a painter, while her brother is the historian Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau. She studied for her baccalaureate at the Molière Institute in Paris and earned her PhD in History with a thesis on the plague in the Middle Ages. She has worked as a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, for its acronym in French) and at the Pasteur Institute, and is specialized in archaeozoology. She has also worked at the archaeological excavations in Rue de Lutèce, in front of the Palais de Justice in Paris, and in the monastery of La Charité-sur-Loire.

She wrote his first crime fiction novel, Les Jeux de l’amour et de la mort, in the mid-80s, in parallel with her work at an archaeological excavation in Nièvre, winning first prize at the Cognac Festival with this book. She chose the pseudonym Vargas, as did her twin sister Jo, in homage to María Vargas, the character played by Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa. The main series of novels by Vargas, and the one that has been the most successful, is that of Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg. She has also published other novels not featuring this character, as well as some works of nonfiction. Vargas gives great importance in her texts to the characters, subplots and dialogues. She also highlights in her writing the presence of legends and historical events and the importance of humour and poetry.