Showing results for "Arts" in Crime Fiction

“This book feels like a secret I’m not supposed to share . . . but it’s too good not to! Set in New York’s art world, full of lies, money, and very messy choices, our May Pick is The Fine Art of Lying by Alexandra Andrews." —Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club May ’26 Pick)...

Former stand-up comic Juno Mulligan has been suffering a serious sense-of-humour failure. Not only has she lost the love of her life, but she’s having to relocate to the (admittedly idyllic) village of Inkbury to watch out for her elderly mother, who she’s genuinely worried might be marrying a wife-killer. She hopes that her old friend, disgraced-journalist-turned-novelist Phoebe Fredericks can help her crack the case of whether her mother’s perma-tanned, iceberg-smiled, three-times-a-widower fiancé is hiding a murderous past.

Umiko Wada has had enough excitement in life. With an overbearing mother and her husband recently murdered, she just wants to keep her head down. As a secretary to a private detective, her life is pleasantly filled with coffee runs and paperwork. That is, until her boss takes on a new case. A case that is surrounded by shadows. A case that means Wada will have to leave Tokyo and travel to London.

Adam Emerson always believed martial arts were about discipline, respect, and mastering the self—until he found himself in the middle of a deadly conspiracy that demanded more than skill. It demanded survival. After witnessing a brutal crime connected to a powerful underground network, Adam is thrust into a world where political corruption, shadowy operatives, and ruthless killers collide. With danger closing in, Adam must rely on every lesson he’s ever learned—on and off the mat—to uncover the truth and stay alive long enough to expose it.

Brought to you by Penguin. Umiko Wada never set out to be a private detective, let alone become the one-woman operation behind the Kodaka Detective Agency. But so it has turned out, thanks to the death of her former boss, Kazuto Kodaka, in mysterious circumstances. Keen to avoid a similar fate...

Bon appetit en Alsace! Laurent Wendling, ein junger Elsässer Landwirt, liegt erschlagen auf seinem Acker in der Nähe des idyllischen Örtchens Pfaffenhoffen. Noch am selben Abend verunglückt seine Frau mit ihrem Auto. Ex-Commissaire Jean Paul Rapp kennt die Familie persönlich und ist mit den Ermittlungen seines Nachfolgers Rimbout keineswegs einverstanden. Entschlossen macht er sich selbst daran, dem mysteriösen Fall auf den Grund zu gehen, und stößt dabei auf brisante Verwicklungen jeglicher Couleur.

In the tranquil town of Cedar Plains, where safety and community are sacred, Courtney Faith’s ideal life is upended by a body found on a local farm, shattering her peaceful existence. Her friend, Alexa Huston, intimately familiar with chaos, gets entangled in an accidental murder that escalates her spiraling life into deeper darkness. Alexa wrestles with a disturbing question: Is murder justifiable if it targets the deserving?

Six years ago, the "Fabulous Gustave" slipped the grasp of Agent Fleur van Beekhof, making off with a priceless artwork . . . and Fleur's beautifully ordered life. Suddenly the cool, pragmatic Europol detective lost her detective partner and wife, her rising career, and her control, thanks to the addictive lure of cards. When a new Italian art theft bears all the markings of Gustave's taunting style, Fleur is put back in the field, because no one knows him better. She jumps at the chance to correct the mistake that ruined her life. The hitch? She has to work with her fiery ex-wife.

The first book in the Mindful Detective series, starring DI Shanti Joyce. When a famously narcissistic performance artist is found floating in a tank of formaldehyde at her own private view, suspicion falls on those closest to her. Leading the murder investigation is DI Shanti Joyce, recently transferred from London to Yeovil following the collapse of her marriage and a case that went wrong. 

Brought to you by Penguin. Dr Leo Black is one of Oxford University's rising stars. His lectures play to a packed audience of adoring students. He seems destined for tenure amongst the gleaming spires. But Worcester College has never employed a man like Leo Black before. For twenty years Leo...

Three glass cabinets appear in London's Trafalgar Square containing a gruesome art installation: the floating corpses of three homeless men. Shock turns to horror when it becomes clear that the bodies are real. The cabinets are traced to @nonymous—an underground artist shrouded in mystery who makes a chilling promise: more will follow. Eighteen years ago, Detective Inspector Grace Archer escaped a notorious serial killer. Now, she and her caustic DS, Harry Quinn, must hunt down another.

How do you catch a killer who thinks murder is art? Michael Fisher sees himself as an artist rather than a killer and poses his victims to resemble famous paintings. Detective Nick Kelly is called to attend the latest crime scene and finds himself at the centre of a media storm. But while the rest of the police department feels under pressure, Nick relishes the attention. Karen Kelly, Nick’s soon to be ex-wife, watches in horror as this brutal game of cat and mouse plays out. But Karen has secrets of her own.

Daniel Ballantyne: monster and angel, thief and conman, genius - and murderer? Newly released from Wormwood Scrubs, and dying of cancer, notorious art forger Daniel Ballantyne agrees to help art critic Jessica Brown write his biography. But as Jessica digs deeper into his life, she realises that nearly everything he's told her is a lie, and behind his charming persona is a man capable of almost anything. Trapped in a cat-and-mouse game with a master manipulator, Jessica finds herself putting her reputation - and her life - on the line.

It is a cold wintry morning in the picturesque port town of Visby when art dealer Egon Wallin's battered and naked body is found hanging from a gate in the town's old city walls. His was a very public death, but who killed him and why? As Inspector Knutas begins his investigation, Egon's secrets quickly begin to come to the surface. He died on the eve of leaving his wife. Is his death a spurned lover's revenge? And when a painting by a new cause-célèbre artist is stolen from his gallery, more questions are raised.

London. A snowy December, 1888. Sherlock Holmes, 34, is languishing and back on cocaine after a disastrous Ripper investigation. Watson can neither comfort nor rouse his friend – until a strangely encoded letter arrives from Paris. Mlle La Victoire, a beautiful French cabaret star writes that...

Ethan Muller is struggling to establish his reputation as a dealer in the cut-throat world of contemporary art when he is alerted to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: in a decaying New York slum, an elderly tenant has disappeared, leaving behind a staggeringly large trove of original drawings and paintings. Nobody can tell Ethan much about the old man, except that he came and went in solitude for nearly forty years, his genius hidden and unacknowledged.

The newly formed Ministry of Fine Arts has a staffing problem - one minister dead within six months of its inception, his successor snuffed out shortly before the General Election. When a third victim, Permanent Secretary Edwin Pompfret is fatally crushed by the fall of a giant bust, Inspector Julian Rivers is drawn into a case of murder of artistic devilment.

Funny, what people seem to want. In Art, Mystery, a controversial former footballer, now export agent specializing in chrome, accepts an unusual commission—to find and export a pornographic work of Renaissance art.

From bestselling novelist Patrícia Melo comes a masterful thriller set in the far west of Brazil that is by turns poetic, inspiring, humorous and harrowing. To escape an overprotective family and an abusive partner, a young lawyer accepts an assignment in the Amazonian border town of Cruzeiro do Sul. There, she meets Carla, a local prosecutor, and Marcos, the son of an indigenous woman, and learns about an epidemic of violence against women that seems beyond comprehension.

Following his recovery from a personal and professional trauma, DCI Cyril Bennett returns to discover a complex case involving the art world. Soon, he unearths a dark side of the industry where greed and dubious practices thrive and, where there is money to be made, violence and murder abound. Working their way through a maze of galleries, museums and the Internet, can Bennett’s team differentiate between real and fake?