Killer Art

Vika Chen used to curate at MoMA. Now she teaches art at a college, and her new job takes a grim turn when she finds Professor McGuire strangled in a campus art studio. McGuire had been tied to an exhibition that set out to expose AI-generated art, and with the body found on her watch, Vika becomes the police's prime suspect.

The local investigation goes nowhere, so Vika teams up with Sam Worthing, a journalism professor who once covered crime for the New York Times. Both are new to academia and neither expected to play detective, but their backgrounds in the art world and in reporting turn out to suit the work well. Their digging turns up several people who could have felt threatened by the exhibition, which does not endear them to the police chief.

The danger soon becomes personal when someone tries to run Vika off the road. More bodies follow, and the two amateur sleuths begin to piece together a patchwork of secrets that someone is willing to kill to keep hidden.

Killer Art, from Crooked Lane Books, is a campus mystery by Jon St. Denis.