10 Literary Thrillers Set in the Artworld

When you walk away from a career in the art world, you walk away with a head full of stories. My first novel explores ambition in visual arts–and specifically female ambition. What does it take to make it big as a young woman in this glamorous, cutthroat world where nothing is what it seems? And what happens when all that ambition goes wrong?

After a studio fire, the main character of Bourland’s novel has to remake (ie, fake) her own paintings for an upcoming exhibition. She heads to a rural residency to do so in secret. There she stumbles onto the truth about the mysterious death of an art world idol. I’ve heard this book classified as satire, but I promise you, the art world is really this crazy.

A troubled artist tries to solve a potential murder in all the wrong ways. Brilliant commentary on the intersection of art, class, and influencer culture. Bonus: unhinged female main characters are the most fun to read.

The title of this book refers to the deterioration of an image each time it is reproduced–think of zooming in on a digital image of an old photograph reproduced in a black and white newspaper. Hand’s novel is a seriously dark and gritty tale of a photographer of a certain age who embarks on a journey to the remote islands of Maine to interview her once-upon-a-time artistic idol—only to find herself embroiled in a missing person’s case.

A poignant exploration of the real life murder of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta by her famous sculptor husband, Gonzalez’s novel transports its reader to 1980s New York. Part crime novel, part art history lesson, and part ghost story, Anita de Monte Laughs Last will have you seething at white male hegemony– and googling Mendieta’s brilliant work (if you don’t already know her).

As much about the artistic process as it is about the infamous theft at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The Art Forger has everything: heists, extreme wealth, lies, and scandals, and a smart artist protagonist who is determined to figure it all out. Spoiler: she does.

O’Farrell is a genius with language. Here she uses the process of portrait painting to explore the life of an upper class woman during the Florentine Renaissance. Lucrezia is wealthy but powerless, a possession to be traded and bartered over. Married off at 13, she is subject to the whims and wants of her powerful husband– a man who may want her dead.

There is no better setting for an arty thriller than The Cloisters—the Met auxiliary in Harlem that specializes in medieval art and architecture. Ann appears for her first day at her Cloisters internship and is immediately dropped into a world so much more interesting than she thought possible. Her boss is a scholar obsessed with antique tarot cards, and her new friends include a horticulturist and a Manhattan heiress. When one of them dies suddenly, only Ann is suspicious enough to seek answers from the cards.

Reading Mouth to Mouth feels like eavesdropping. Two acquaintances meet by chance in the first-class lounge at JFK airport, one (Jeff) begins to tell the other (our unnamed narrator) a long, strange story—a confession of sorts–about saving a drowning man’s life on a Los Angeles beach. When the drowning man turns out to be a gallerist-to-the-stars, and not a totally moral one, Jeff decides to take advantage of the situation. Part Talented Mr. Ripley, part Great Gatsby, full of dread and foreboding.

Archivist Kate is already in trouble when she arrives at the California estate of the famous late photographer, Miranda Brand. Hired by Brand’s son Theo years after her apparent suicide, Kate must shuffle through and decades of ephemera, negatives, and trash in order to salvage Miranda’s legacy. But in the process, she finds herself drawn to mysterious (and dangerous?) Theo while uncovering evidence that Miranda’s death was far more suspicious than the world understands. Ultimately Sligar’s novel is a haunting and suspenseful story about women and the sacrifices they make for their art.