Art Crime

The art world is one of the most secretive of global businesses, and the list of its crimes runs long and deep. Today, with prices in the hundreds of millions for individual artworks, and billionaires' collections among the most conspicuous and liquid of their assets, crime is more rampant than ever in this largely unregulated universe. Increased prices and globalization have introduced new levels of fraud and malfeasance into the art world—everything from "artnapping," in which an artwork is held hostage and only returned for a ransom, to forgery and tax fraud.

Crime and Punishment stands as one of the most penetrating psychological dramas ever written—a dark, relentless journey into the mind of a young man who believes he can outthink morality itself. Raskolnikov, trapped in the poverty-stricken streets of St. Petersburg and drowning in his own feverish theories, commits a desperate act that shatters every illusion he ever held about power, conscience, and destiny. In the days that follow, he discovers that the courts do not deal out the real punishment, but by the silent terror of his own soul.

On March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers walked into a Boston museum and walked out with half a billion dollars in art. No alarms stopped them. No bullets were fired. Thirteen masterpieces vanished before dawn. The Gardner Museum Heist: America's Greatest Art Theft tells the complete true crime story behind the most significant art robbery in United States history. This audiobook takes you inside the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a Venetian style palace built to house one woman's extraordinary collection.

Springtime on the Cornish coast and Porthpella’s artistic community are throwing open their doors, welcoming visitors to the annual Arts Trail. And this year, celebrity artist Harrison Loveday is the guest of honour. However, the light mood soon darkens when there’s a dramatic death at the opening-night party, and after threatening messages start appearing around the village, fear takes over. Before long, Porthpella is shocked by a second brutal murder, and whisperings of a ‘serial killer’ start to circulate.

The world’s most renowned art forger reveals the secrets behind his decades of painting like the masters—exposing an art world that is far more corrupt than we ever knew while providing an art history lesson wrapped in sex, drugs, and Caravaggio. The art world is a much dirtier, nastier...

When he retired as the chief security officer of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Barelli had spent the better part of 40 years responsible not only for one of the richest treasure troves on the planet, but the museum's staff, the millions of visitors, as well as American presidents, royalty, and heads of state from around the world. For the first time, John Barelli shares his experiences of the crimes that occurred on his watch, the investigations that captured thieves and recovered artwork....

Three glass cabinets appear in London's Trafalgar Square containing a gruesome art installation: the floating corpses of three homeless men. Shock turns to horror when it becomes clear that the bodies are real. The cabinets are traced to @nonymous—an underground artist shrouded in mystery who makes a chilling promise: more will follow. Eighteen years ago, Detective Inspector Grace Archer escaped a notorious serial killer. Now, she and her caustic DS, Harry Quinn, must hunt down another.

The newly formed Ministry of Fine Arts has a staffing problem - one minister dead within six months of its inception, his successor snuffed out shortly before the General Election. When a third victim, Permanent Secretary Edwin Pompfret is fatally crushed by the fall of a giant bust, Inspector Julian Rivers is drawn into a case of murder of artistic devilment.

'Probably the greatest storyteller of our age' – The Mail on Sunday Would you risk your life for a painting? Globe-spanning and truly page-turning, False Impression is a compulsive thriller from Jeffrey Archer, bestselling author of The Clifton Chronicles and the William Warwick novels. The...

London. A snowy December, 1888. Sherlock Holmes, 34, is languishing and back on cocaine after a disastrous Ripper investigation. Watson can neither comfort nor rouse his friend – until a strangely encoded letter arrives from Paris. Mlle La Victoire, a beautiful French cabaret star writes that...

One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first century: the story of the world’s most prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser. In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, the best-selling author of The Stranger in the Woods brings us into...

Throughout John Mortimer's career, he established profound friendships with people accused of various crimes. He also indulged his passion for writing, penning Paradise Postponed and a series of stories about Rumpole, for whom he was often mistaken. With wit, wisdom and tenderness, he has written the story of his life.

Brought to you by Puffin. Margot, Wesley and Josephine have got an awesome weekend mapped out for the end of the holidays before they start high school – and they don’t want anything to stand in the way of their BIG plans in London. But when they are staying with Margot's mum and her new...

It started as a student exercise, the knife under the drape, the model's pose chalked in place. But before Agatha Troy, artist and instructor, returns to the class, the pose has been re-enacted in earnest: the model is dead, fixed for ever in one of the most dramatic poses Troy has ever seen. It's a difficult case for Chief Detective Inspector Alleyn. How can he believe that the woman he loves is a murderess? And yet no one can be above suspicion.

I Turned Phone Hacking from a Backstreet Business into Industrial-Scale Organised Crime... for the British Press. But I started life as the penniless son of Ukrainian immigrants. Then I rose to be one of the most powerful news executives in Rupert Murdoch’s empire. My dad was in Hitler’s SS. My mum was a Nazi slave – I was born ready for the Fleet Street cauldron. At the News of the World, I broke the biggest exclusives. However, I discovered a secret weapon that would revolutionise news gathering: the use of Illegal Private Investigators to hack and blag.

A haunting new novel about impossible love from acclaimed and bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard The year is 1976. Syvert Løyning is on his way home to his wife and two sons, Syvert and Joar, after a business trip. When his car breaks down outside his hometown of Arendal, he is forced to...

A chance discovery of something unimaginable will steer Detective Patrick Gutteridge’s life down a path littered with memories of his past, memories he’s spent a decade trying to forget. For two years, Gloucester’s provincial streets have glowed to the media interest gifted by the works of an anonymous graffiti artist, Tick-Tock. But the art is changing, distorting, each piece becoming more perverse and contentious than the last. Only DI Gutteridge sees a pattern forming which points to something far more sinister looming on the horizon.

How can she prove her innocence to save her son, when she's already been convicted of murdering his father? Art school dropout Lucie is on a backpacking trip across Europe when she arrives in the idyllic Swiss Alps. A holiday romance with ski instructor Mathieu takes a crucial turn when Lucie discovers she is pregnant. Spiralling into a relationship of coercion and dark domestic abuse, Lucie is powerless to escape her marriage without losing her son.

What if a villain believes they are a hero? Our addiction to social media has created a new version of fame. And lurking beneath the surface of beautiful, polished social media accounts is a community being targeted by a killer. Ela's life is falling apart after she experiences a miscarriage. Her marriage dissolves while the rest of her life feels on hold. In order to deal with the grief and guilt from losing the pregnancy, Ela spends a lot of time on her phone. And the more time she spends online, the more her new identity begins to take shape.

In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime were turning up all over New York, but the police were baffled: There were no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most perplexing murder.