Art Crime

One late-summer’s evening, before the beginning of the new term, Dorothy Martin and her husband, retired police detective Alan Nesbitt, are guests at Sherebury University art department’s drinks party to introduce the new teaching assistant, sculptress Gillian Roberts. However, tragedy strikes on a tour of the sculpture department when the lift breaks down and a corpse is discovered at the bottom of the lift shaft. Dorothy and Alan become involved in the ensuing investigation, putting their local knowledge and sleuthing skills to good use once again.

Ex-Royal Marine Ezio Trevino is trying to go straight. He and his crew have turned a crumbling Glasgow bar into the city's hottest new spot. But with debts piling up, a rival gang closing in, and his mother’s medical bills hanging over him, Ezio is forced back into the life he tried to escape. Their plan? Intercept a hidden fortune from an incoming weapons shipment. But in Glasgow’s underworld, nothing stays buried—not money, not enemies, and not the grief Ezio thought he’d left behind. Can he pull off one last job and keep his crew alive—or will the past, and its ghosts, drag them all down?

A delightful account of the seasons in a house and its garden near the sea, a domestic idyll of hardy plants and neighbors, outer and inner weather, love and loss, and taking stock of the life we’ve made The delicious long-form poem “The Vineyard” is set in and around the quasi-fictional...

THE CURATORS OF CULTURE: Celebrate Black digital art in this essay collection revealing how Black artists have shaped everything from TikTok dances to viral memes Steven Underwood digs into the current Black digital arts movement that has shaped popular culture for the last decade. He connects...

A year after the private detective uncovered a criminal ring disguised as a mink farm in the Ozarks, O’Keefe is back home and back in trouble. A high school crush of O’Keefe’s turns up dead, but the details don’t add up. His pal, Mike Harrigan, has put his trust in the wrong people and now stands accused of crimes that could put him in the slammer. And O’Keefe? The mafia has put a price on his head. In their search for the truth, O’Keefe and his team will have to venture into the criminal underworld of their city, each step forward bringing them closer to the edge.

Not long ago, Somerville, Massachusetts was commonly referred to as “Slummerville.” A gritty, blue-collar town just north of Boston, its major claim to fame was a brutal gang war. Then, the Boston subway system’s Red Line came to Somerville’s Davis Square, and the town began to attract a more affluent, professional class to mix with its traditional working class base. The mixing has not always been easy.

When their son Arthur mysteriously vanishes in the idyllic village of Kenwood, Emily and Derek are plunged into a heart-pounding race against time to uncover the truth behind his disappearance. As the facade of their once-perfect community crumbles, the couple must navigate a treacherous web of deceit and betrayal, testing the very meaning of family and trust. Discover the chilling secret that will leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about this seemingly peaceful village.

Everything is not as it seems during those balmy summer days at one of Oxford’s most prestigious colleges. Lorcan Greene, wealthy gallery owner and expert forgery-spotter, is hired by Detective Braine of the Art Fraud Squad to investigate a tip-off in Oxford. But Lorcan gets more than he bargains for, falling in love with talented art student Frederica Delacroix. But what’s she hiding and could she even be involved in forgery herself?

A notorious white supremacist named Richard Barrett was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 2010 by a young Black man named Vincent McGee. At first the murder seemed a twist on old Deep South race crimes. But then new revelations and complications came to light. Maybe it was a dispute over money rather than race - or, maybe and intriguingly, over sex.

Spring is a magical time in England - bluebells massing along the woodland paths, primrose and wild thyme dotting the meadows. Antiques dealer Kate Hamilton is spending the month of May in the Suffolk village of Long Barston, enjoying precious time with Detective Inspector Tom Mallory. While attending the May Fair, the annual pageant based on a well-known Anglo-Saxon folktale, a body turns up in the middle of the festivities.

Bishop Juan Gerardi, Guatemala's leading human rights activist, was bludgeoned to death in his garage on a Sunday night in 1998, two days after the presentation of a groundbreaking church-sponsored report implicating the military in the murders and disappearances of some 200,000 civilians.

A troubled Mary Ann Walker takes a nosedive off a bridge. Seattle's police department macho man John LaMoia takes the call, along with the beauteous cop psychologist Daphne Matthews. They suspect her boyfriend, known to beat Mary Ann. Her seething brother, Ferrell, is convinced the boyfriend did the deed. But the case somehow becomes too slippery to close.

Henry Lindon's flight across the north Atlantic was turbulent and sleepless. His plane has just touched down in Amsterdam, where he’s come to work as a visiting professor. Lindon is torn about leaving his troubled wife, Marylou, behind in Dallas, but relieved and excited to start a new chapter in a lively city. But troubles from the past soon cross the Atlantic. Lindon discovers that notorious Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren, born in 1899, is about to play a part in Lindon’s own personal drama.

Over the course of his 27 years with the DEA, Ed Follis bought eight-balls of cocaine in a red Corvette, negotiated multimillion-dollar deals onboard private King Airs, and developed covert relationships with men who were not only international drug traffickers but - in some cases - operatives for al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Shan United Army, or the Mexican federation of cartels. Follis was, in fact, one of the driving forces behind the agency's radical shift from a limited local focus to a global arena.

Marion Spicer spends her days examining auction catalogues and searching for stolen works of art. All this changes when she inherits a prestigious collection of pre-Columbian art from a father she never knew; she must face the merciless microcosm of Paris art auctions and galleries, with its sharks, schemes, fences, traps, scams, and attacks. Her quest draws her into a world where people will kill for a love of beauty.

In a Europe on the verge of collapse, the Nazi organisation Ahnenerbe is pillaging sacred landmarks across the world. Their aim is to collect treasures with occult powers, which will help them establish the Third Reich. The organisation's head, Himmler, has sent SS officers to search a forgotten sanctuary in the Himalayas, whilst he tries to track down a mysterious painting. Which ancient power do the Nazis believe they hold the key to?

In her youth, amidst the throes of a reckless grief, aspiring Australian writer Marele Day is caught up in a shipwreck adventure and forges an unlikely bond with an international fugitive travelling under a pseudonym. For the next 30 years they correspond before reuniting, both older and wiser, in France.

“A powerful memoir of one man’s struggle for freedom, 15 to Life tells in vivid prose the story of Anthony Papa, a painter and a casualty of the War on Drugs. This journey of a soul shows the power of art to transcend the violence of prison, and all that is possible when the human spirit refuses to be contained. Papa’s account should be required reading for New York lawmakers and all Americans who care about civil liberties.” (Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking)

Cinema emerged alongside the rules that ushered in boxing’s modern age and the “squared circle” proved the ideal stage for cinematic display. The public had its first taste of the new medium in 1894 through a heavyweight bout, recognized today as the world’s first feature film. Smash Hit: Race, Crime, and Culture in Boxing Films uses twenty films as the basis of a hard-nosed exploration as to how the genre held a bloody mirror to twentieth century America’s most prominent social anxieties, elucidating two conjoined mediums that serve as bellwether to an ever-shifting cultural zeitgeist.

Taking on a case that sounded simple, Morgan Stark and Felicity O’Brien are tasked to retrieve two high-value paintings, but it quickly becomes more complicated. Using past connections, the ex-mercenary and the former jewel thief go undercover as part of J.J. Slash's growing crime empire.