Art of Murder Mysteries

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?

On the night of August 11, 1956, in the East Hampton hamlet of Springs, Jackson Pollock crashed his car into a tree, killing himself. Pollock, the world-renowned abstract painter and notorious alcoholic, also killed his 24-year old passenger Edith Metzger in the crash...or did he? Metzger's autopsy reveals that she was already dead before the crash. Murdered? Perhaps. This shocking disclosure 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.