Following a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker steals a priceless Dutch painting, “The Goldfinch,” an act that binds him to the art underworld for the rest of his life.
The novel chronicles his turbulent journey through grief, trauma, and a series of surrogate homes, with the painting serving as his only tangible link to his past. The narrative interrogates themes of loss, authenticity, the enduring power of art, and the complex ways beauty and tragedy shape identity.
Twelve-year-old Claudia Kincaid and her younger brother Jamie run away from home to live secretly in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. While hiding among the exhibits, they become captivated by the mystery of a beautiful marble angel statue, believed to be the work of Michelangelo.
The novel explores themes of independence, curiosity, and the search for meaning, framing the museum as a place of discovery where adventure and knowledge intertwine.
Set in Istanbul, this novel follows Kemal, a wealthy man whose obsessive love for a distant relative, Füsun, leads him to collect objects that chronicle their relationship. After Füsun’s death, he transforms his collection into a museum dedicated to their story, with the novel itself serving as the museum’s catalog.
The book is a profound meditation on memory, longing, the nature of collections, and the use of objects to preserve moments in time.
Days before a major new exhibition is set to open, a series of gruesome murders occurs within the shadowy halls of New York’s American Museum of Natural History. FBI Special Agent Pendergast and museum researcher Margo Green must hunt a terrifying, chimerical creature that is stalking the institution’s labyrinthine corridors and collections.
The novel blends science fiction and horror, exploring themes of institutional secrecy, scientific hubris, and the primal fears lurking beneath civilized surfaces.
Struggling artist Claire Roth makes a Faustian bargain to forge a masterpiece by Degas, one of the paintings stolen in the infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. In return, a powerful gallery owner promises to resurrect her career. As she recreates the painting, she uncovers evidence that the "stolen" original might itself be a forgery.
The novel dissects themes of authenticity, ambition, and artistic integrity, blurring the lines between creation and deception within the high-stakes art world.
The murder of a curator inside the Louvre Museum launches Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu on a breathless chase through Paris and London. They follow a trail of clues hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci, uncovering a secret society and a historical conspiracy that threatens the foundations of Western religion.
The novel uses museum artifacts and architecture as the primary keys to its central mystery, exploring themes of faith, history, and interpretation.
Psychiatrist Andrew Marlow attempts to treat renowned painter Robert Oliver, who was arrested after attacking a painting at the National Gallery of Art. Oliver’s refusal to speak forces Marlow to investigate his patient's life, uncovering a tragic, centuries-old love story from the letters of a 19th-century French Impressionist.
The narrative examines obsession, artistic genius, and the mysterious power of art to connect lives across time.
Commander Adam Dalgliesh investigates a murder at the Dupayne Museum, a small private institution dedicated to the morbid history of crime in the 1920s and 30s. The museum itself is at the center of a bitter family dispute, and the murder appears to mimic one of the historical crimes on display.
The novel is a classic whodunit that explores themes of family dysfunction, obsession with the past, and the dark allure of violence.
In early 20th-century New York, Coralie Sardie performs as a mermaid in her father’s grotesque sideshow museum on Coney Island. Her life intersects with that of Eddie Cohen, a photographer who documents the city’s horrors, when they are both drawn into the mystery of a young woman’s disappearance after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
The novel uses its peculiar museum setting to explore themes of otherness, exploitation, and the search for beauty in the bizarre.
Larry, the new night watchman at New York's American Museum of Natural History, discovers that his job is more complicated than he imagined when the exhibits—from a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton to Theodore Roosevelt—come to life after the museum closes.
This illustrated children’s book celebrates the magic of history and imagination, portraying the museum not as a static collection of objects but as a vibrant, living world of adventure.
Told through a unique combination of prose and illustration, this novel weaves together two parallel stories. In 1977, a deaf boy named Ben runs away to New York to find his father, using clues at the American Museum of Natural History. In 1927, a deaf girl named Rose escapes to the city to find an actress she idolizes.
Their quests converge across time, culminating at the Queens Museum of Art in a story about family, communication, and the human need for connection.
An English farm wife, Tina Hopgood, writes a letter to a curator at the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark about her lifelong fascination with the Tollund Man, an ancient body preserved in a peat bog.
This initiates a thoughtful and tender correspondence with the curator, Anders Larsen, as they confide in each other about their quiet lives, their regrets, and their hopes. The novel is an epistolary exploration of human connection, second chances, and the role museums play in preserving not just artifacts, but also our shared sense of wonder.
As Alzheimer’s disease clouds her present, Marina, a Russian émigré in America, retreats into the vivid memories of her youth as a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum during the Siege of Leningrad.
While starving citizens froze, she and her colleagues evacuated the museum’s priceless art, and she mentally cataloged every empty frame to create a "memory palace" of beauty against the horrors of war. The novel poignantly explores the resilience of the human spirit and the enduring power of art to sustain hope.
While researching in Rome, English art historian Jonathan Argyll stumbles upon evidence that a newly discovered Titian painting in a small church might actually be a long-lost Raphael. His discovery thrusts him into a dangerous international conspiracy, investigated by the sharp-witted Flavia di Stefano of the Italian National Art Theft Squad.
The plot unfolds across Europe’s galleries and archives, examining the greed, pride, and deception that fester within the world of art curation and authentication.
Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cooper investigates the murder of a research scholar whose body is found in the depths of the American Museum of Natural History. The case soon expands to the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art, revealing a sinister world of stolen artifacts, academic rivalry, and the illegal trafficking of human remains.
The novel uses its museum settings to explore the ethical compromises and hidden crimes that can occur within prestigious cultural institutions.
A construction project in modern-day New York unearths a 19th-century charnel house containing 36 skeletons, all bearing marks of ritualistic murder.
When a copycat killer begins replicating the historical crimes, FBI Agent Pendergast enlists museum archaeologist Nora Kelly to help him access the archives of her museum—a descendant of an old cabinet of curiosities—to solve a chilling mystery that spans more than a century.
The story delves into the dark history of collecting and the obsession with forbidden knowledge.
On the opening night of her provocative new exhibition at a Los Angeles museum, controversial artist Kim Lord vanishes. The exhibition, a series of self-portraits recreating famous crime scene photos of murdered women, suddenly becomes a real-life mystery.
Maggie Richter, an editor at the museum, finds herself drawn into the investigation, which explores themes of violence against women, artistic commodification, and the murky line between representation and reality.
The novel alternates between two timelines connected to New York's Grand Central Terminal. In the 1920s, Clara Darden defies convention to become an illustrator at the Grand Central School of Art.
Fifty years later, Virginia Clay, a recently divorced single mother working at the terminal’s information booth, discovers Clara’s abandoned and forgotten art studio, leading her to uncover the artist's story and its connection to a masterpiece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The story examines themes of female ambition, historical preservation, and the rediscovery of lost art.
Arky Levin, a film score composer, finds his life stalled by grief and creative block. He begins visiting the Museum of Modern Art to watch Marina Abramović’s famous performance piece, “The Artist Is Present,” where she sits silently in the museum atrium, meeting the gaze of strangers.
The novel follows Arky and other museum visitors whose lives are profoundly touched by the exhibit, exploring the transformative power of performance art and the deep human need for connection.
Lance Henry Withers is an African American art appraiser who finds himself caught in an ethical crisis when he must value a collection of Southern "heritage" art with a dark and stolen provenance. As he navigates the fraught history of the pieces, he is forced to confront his own family's painful past and the legacy of racial injustice.
The novel uses the world of art appraisal and curation to explore themes of identity, restitution, and the complex ownership of cultural history.
In 1894 Cambridge, a renowned art historian is found murdered in his office at the Fitzwilliam Museum, a cryptic note left on his body.
Former Scotland Yard detective Daniel Wilson and archaeologist Abigail Fenton are called to investigate the crime, which plunges them into a world of academic jealousy, forgery, and clandestine societies within the university's hallowed halls. The mystery hinges on the priceless artifacts and scholarly rivalries contained within the museum.
In a city ravaged by a mysterious revolution, a young woman named Dora is given a job at the National Museum of the Revolution, an institution that both chronicles and controls the city’s strange, contested history.
As she navigates its bizarre exhibits and secret passages, she begins to uncover the truth about her own past and the tyrannical "Curator" who runs the city. This allegorical novel uses its fantastical museum setting to explore themes of memory, storytelling, and resistance against institutional power.
In the tightly controlled city of Jewel, where children are kept on leashes to prevent accidents, Goldie Roth escapes her Separation Day and flees to the mysterious Museum of Dunt. The museum is a chaotic and dangerous place, filled with living exhibits, hidden dangers, and a band of child thieves.
Goldie must learn to be brave and quick-witted to survive in this fantastical museum, which serves as a metaphor for the thrills and risks of freedom.
Set in Giverny, the village where Claude Monet painted his famous water lilies, this mystery connects three women: a young girl with a talent for painting, a beautiful schoolteacher with a secret lover, and an old woman who sees everything from her window.
When a wealthy art patron is found murdered, the investigation unravels a decades-old secret, with Monet’s art and the Musée des Impressionnismes serving as a constant, shimmering backdrop that blurs the line between illusion and reality.
This dual-timeline novel connects a Renaissance woman who sits for Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, "Lady with an Ermine," with a young art conservator in Nazi-occupied Poland tasked with saving the very same portrait from being stolen by the Third Reich. Decades later, an American soldier working for the Monuments Men program tracks the painting.
The story highlights the enduring power of a single work of art and the desperate measures people will take to create, possess, or preserve it, framing museums and collections as battlegrounds for cultural survival.
Thomas Lynch, a misfit art historian with a dubious reputation, is hired to authenticate a private collection in a decaying country mansion, hoping to find a lost masterpiece by Giovanni Bellini. His investigation spirals into a dark obsession as he uncovers the owner's deranged family secrets and confronts his own unstable psyche.
The novel is a Gothic exploration of genius, madness, and the deceptive nature of beauty, questioning whether the search for artistic truth is worth the cost.
Following the death of her grandfather, thirteen-year-old Theodora Tenpenny discovers a note that leads her to a priceless Renaissance painting hidden beneath one of his own artworks.
With the help of a new friend, Theo embarks on a scavenger hunt through New York City, delving into art history and her family’s secret past, which connects them to the Monuments Men of World War II. The novel is a charming mystery centered on the idea that great art, and great secrets, can be found in the most unexpected places.
Katarina Bishop, born into a family of world-class thieves, has left the "family business" for a normal life at a prestigious boarding school. But when her father is accused of stealing priceless paintings from a ruthless mobster's collection, Kat is forced back into the game.
She assembles a crew of talented teenagers to pull off an impossible heist: robbing the heavily guarded Henley Museum to steal back the paintings and clear her father’s name.
Art restorer and Israeli spy Gabriel Allon is pulled out of his quiet life in Cornwall to track down a stolen Rembrandt portrait. His investigation reveals that the painting’s theft is connected to a Swiss billionaire with a dark past and a global network of financial crime and terrorism.
The narrative moves from Glastonbury to Amsterdam and Geneva, delving into the shadowy underworld of art trafficking and the moral complexities of recovering treasures tainted by war and greed.
In 1913, Laura Lyons lives with her family in an apartment inside the New York Public Library, where her husband is the superintendent. When rare books begin to disappear from the library's collection, Laura’s life is upended.
Eighty years later, her granddaughter Sadie, a curator at the same library, is curating a major exhibition when valuable items once again go missing, forcing her to confront her family’s long-buried secrets. The novel treats the library as a living museum, exploring the power of knowledge and the secrets hidden within its walls.
In 1889 Paris, treasure-hunter and hotelier Séverin Montagnet-Alarie is offered an opportunity to reclaim his lost inheritance. To do so, he and his crew of diverse experts must break into the heavily guarded museum of a magical secret society and steal an ancient artifact.
Blending fantasy with historical fiction, the novel is a high-stakes heist story that uses its magical museum setting to explore themes of colonialism, cultural ownership, and the power of found family.
Kate McKinnon, a former NYPD officer turned art historian, is haunted by a family tragedy. She is reluctantly drawn back into police work when a serial killer begins staging murders to mimic famous masterpieces, from Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb to Millais’s Ophelia.
The investigation forces Kate to use her expert knowledge of art history to profile a killer who views murder as the ultimate art form.
In the final years of World War II, a talented young American art student in Paris, David Halifax, is coerced into a forgery ring. He begins creating perfect replicas of masterpieces from the Louvre and other museums to be sold to high-ranking Nazi officials, while the real paintings are secretly saved.
David's work plunges him into a morally treacherous world of espionage and deception, forcing him to question the nature of authenticity, art, and survival.
In a world where a powerful magical energy called "plasm" is the source of all power, the city is run by the Metropolitan, a vast and ancient institution that functions as a combination of a government, a university, and a museum of magical artifacts.
A young woman named Aiah has just passed her exams to work there, but she is soon entangled in a dangerous conspiracy involving a hidden, illegal source of plasm that could upend her entire society. This science fiction novel reimagines the museum as the central pillar of a complex civilization.
This novel gives voice to May Alcott, the ambitious and artistic youngest sister of Louisa May Alcott and the real-life inspiration for Amy in Little Women.
While her sister achieves literary fame, May struggles to be taken seriously as a painter, traveling to London and Paris to study among the masters and have her work exhibited in the prestigious Paris Salon.
The narrative is a compelling portrait of sibling rivalry, female ambition, and the fight for artistic identity in a world that often relegated women to the role of muse, not creator.