Art of Murder Mysteries

Accidents happen. But so does murder... On the night of August 11, 1956, in a quiet East Hampton hamlet, Jackson Pollock crashed his car into a tree. The accident killed Pollock, the world-renowned abstract painter and notorious alcoholic, and his 25-year old passenger, Edith Metzger...or did it? Metzger's autopsy reveals that she was already dead before the crash. Was it murder? This shocking question draws vacationing Detective Juanita Diaz and her husband, Captain Brian Fitzgerald, of the NYPD into a homicide investigation that implicates famous members of East Hampton's art community-including Pollock himself.

One artist. One student. One deadly mystery. When Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton's corpse is discovered behind the easels of Manhattan's famed art school, whispers in the art community say he had it coming. As Benton's list of enemies lengthens to include League instructors, Vietnam War protesters, and members of Andy Warhol's entourage, one art student is ultimately pinned for the crime. The only problem: the suspect has vanished. Why would an art student murder Benton? And, if he were innocent, why would he run? When TJ Fitzgerald, son of Detective Juanita Diaz and Captain Brian Fitzgerald of the NYPD, discovers his classmate is the prime suspect, he uses his investigative skills to try and clear his name. But as TJ and his girlfriend work to unravel the clues, he begins to wonder if the police got it wrong and one secret may be the key to it all...

Murder is a work of art... When the acclaimed Cuban painter Wifredo Lam turns up dead in his Greenwich Village studio, officers Juanita Diaz and Brian Fitzgerald of the NYPD, must investigate the crime. But what they find is much more gruesome than they ever could have imagined. Suspicion soon falls on a tight-knit circle of Surrealist refugees who fled Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, and Diaz and Fitzgerald must traverse the city, from Chinatown's underworld to Spanish Harlem's gangland, to find the truth. Did one of the artists' bizarre parlor games turn deadly? Or is there something even more sinister afoot? "Smart, witty, filled with so much history of the period, beautifully written, and suspenseful."-Jonathan Santlofer, author of The Death Artist