The recent daylight heist at the Louvre Museum in Paris—where a highly organized group slipped into the museum, used a truck-mounted lift and angle-cutters to steal eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels in under eight minutes—has renewed our fascination with the cunning, audacity, and aftermath of art crime.
It’s the perfect moment to turn to the library shelf and explore books that unpack art heists and thefts: the planning, the chase, the cover-ups, and the cultural losses.
Below are standout titles available with your Livingston Library card, that let readers wander the shadowy corridors of stolen art—through true crime narratives, art-historical investigations, and even fictional thrillers inspired by vaults, galleries and vanished masterpieces.
The Antique Hunter’s Death on the Red Sea: A Novel by C. L. Miller
When a painting disappears from a maritime museum and a body is found nearby, Freya Lockwood and her Aunt Carole—of the Lockwood Antique Hunters Agency—set out to investigate. Their search leads them onto an antiques cruise bound for the Red Sea, where they uncover a gallery of stolen artifacts linked to Freya’s late mentor’s unsolved cases. As they hunt a killer, they realize the elusive art trafficker known as The Collector may be on board. Surrounded by suspects and danger, Freya and Carole must unmask the culprit before the ship docks—or risk becoming the next victims.
The Art Forger by Barbara A. Shapiro
On March 18, 1990, thirteen works of art today worth over $500 million were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It remains the largest unsolved art heist in history, and Claire Roth, a struggling young artist, is about to discover that there’s more to this crime than meets the eye.
The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel
Stéphane Bréitwieser is the most prolific art thief of all time. He pulled off more than 200 heists, often in crowded museums in broad daylight. His girlfriend served as his accomplice. His collection was worth an estimated $2 billion. He never sold a piece, displaying his stolen art in his attic bedroom. He felt like a king. Until everything came to a shocking end. In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, Michael Finkel gives us one of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of our times, a riveting story of art, theft, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.
Death and the Old Master by G. M. Malliet
Something is bothering Sir Flyte Rascallian, renowned art expert and Master of Hardwick College at the University of Cambridge. Are the grimy paintings he recently inherited from his aunt as worthless as he claims? When Sir Flyte is found murdered in the Master’s Lodge, Detective Chief Inspector Arthur St. Just must unravel his unusual actions to solve the death of the old master. College fellows, staff, and students all agree something was amiss. But as St. Just investigates, he quickly becomes entangled in a web of deception following the trail of priceless artwork people would kill to possess.
The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft by Ulrich Boser
This is the true story of the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist—the largest art theft in history. Two men stole masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Degas worth over $500 million, none of which have ever been recovered. Following the late art detective Harold Smith’s leads, journalist Ulrich Boser delves into Boston’s criminal underworld, uncovering eccentric thieves, gangsters, and clues to one of the art world’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
The Great Chinese Art Heist : Imperialism, Organized Crime, and the Hidden Story of China’s Stolen Artistic Treasures by Ralph Pezzullo
For the past decade, major European museums have been hit by a string of daring heists targeting ancient Chinese artifacts—treasures once looted from Beijing’s Old Summer Palace during the Second Opium War. Pezzullo traces these modern thefts back to that 19th-century act of plunder, uncovering a tangled web of billionaires, triads, banks, and cartels. Blending history, true crime, and cultural politics, Pezzullo explores how the scars of colonialism still shape global art ownership—and how the fight over cultural heritage continues today.
Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures by Susan Ronald
Ronald reveals in this stranger-than-fiction-tale how Hildebrand Gurlitt succeeded in looting in the name of the Third Reich, duping the Monuments Men and the Nazis alike. As an “official dealer” for Hitler and Goebbels, Hildebrand Gurlitt became one of the Third Reich’s most prolific art looters. Yet he stole from Hitler too, allegedly to save modern art.
Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives Through the Secret World of Stolen Art by Joshua Knelman
This book traces Knelman’s five-year immersion in the shadowy world of art theft, where he uncovers a devious game that takes him from Egypt to Los Angeles, New York to London, and back again, through a web of deceit, violence, and corruption. With a cool, knowing eye, Knelman delves into the lives of professionals such as Paul, a brilliant working-class kid who charmed his way into a thriving career organizing art thefts and running loot across the United Kingdom and beyond, and LAPD detective Donald Hrycyk, one of the few special investigators worldwide who struggle to keep pace with the evolving industry of stolen art. As he becomes more and more immersed in this world, Knelman learns that art theft is no fringe activity—it has evolved into one of the largest black markets in the world, which even Interpol and the FBI admit they cannot contain. In this battle, the thieves are winning.
An Inside Job : A Novel by Daniel Silva
When art restorer and spy Gabriel Allon discovers a woman’s body in the Venetian Lagoon, he’s drawn into a deadly hunt for a lost Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece stolen from the Vatican Museums. The chase takes him from London’s auction houses to the French Riviera, uncovering a web of mobsters, money, and murder that culminates in a shocking showdown in St. Peter’s Square. A thriller that exposes the dark side of art, power, and the Vatican.
The Lost Masterpiece : A Novel by Barbara A. Shapiro
Shapiro embeds us in a circle of famous painters in late-nineteenth-century Paris, centering on the anguished Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot–the one woman in their midst who never got her due–and the story of Morisot’s great-great-great-great granddaughter, Tamara Rubin, who has inherited âEdouard Manet’s Party on the Seine, a painting that completely upends her life. When Tamara inherits Party, she discovers a long-hidden family history replete with unanswered questions: How had it been stolen by the Nazis? How had the painting managed to survive three disasters that destroyed every other artwork around it? And most of all, why had she never known about her ancestor, Berthe Morisot?
The Lost Van Gogh: A Novel by Jonathan Santlofer
For years, there have been whispers that, before his death, Van Gogh completed a final self-portrait. Curators and art historians have savored this rumor, hoping it could illuminate some of the troubled artist’s many secrets, but even they have to concede that the missing painting is likely lost forever. But when Luke Perrone, artist and great-grandson of the man who stole the Mona Lisa, and Alexis Verde, daughter of a notorious art thief, discover what may be the missing portrait, they are drawn into the most epic art puzzles. When only days later the painting disappears again, they are reunited with INTERPOL agent John Washington Smith in a dangerous and deadly search that will not only expose secrets of the artist’s last days but draws them into one of history’s darkest eras.
The Picasso Heist by James Patterson
A newly unveiled Picasso, hidden for a century in a dusty French attic, is set to be auctioned at the prestigious House of Echelon. And Halston has a cunning plan. One that could secure millions for her future, and freedom for her wrongly imprisoned father. But to pull off the heist of the century, she must assemble an unlikely master forger, a ruthless Bulgarian mob boss with his own agenda, and an eccentric fashion designer whose flair for the dramatic might be their only ticket into the elite circles of the art world. In a game where trust is a luxury and failure is not an option, will Halston’s brilliance be enough to outsmart her enemies and secure her freedom?
The Practice Run : How a Failed Art Heist Provided a Blueprint for the World’s Largest Art Robbery by Frederick J. Fisher
In 1990, thieves posing as police stole thirteen artworks worth over half a billion dollars from Boston’s Isabella Gardner Museum. A similar failed attempt a decade earlier at New York’s Hyde Collection was led by Brian McDevitt, who had posed as a wealthy heir to gather insider details. The book traces McDevitt’s crimes, deceptions, and the link between the two heists that exposed both museums’ vulnerabilities.
Stealing the Show : A History of Art and Crime in Six Thefts by John Barelli
Focusing on six thefts but filled with countless stories that span the late 1970s through the 21st Century, John opens the files on thefts, shows how museum personnel along with local and sometimes Federal Agents opened investigations and more often than not caught the thief. But of ultimate importance was the recovery of the artwork, including Celtic and Egyptian gold, French tapestries, Greek sculpture, and more.
The Thefts of the Mona Lisa : The Complete Story of the World’s Most Famous Artwork by Noah Charney
Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait, called the Mona Lisa, is without doubt the world’s most famous painting. It achieved its fame not only because it is a remarkable example of Renaissance portraiture, created by an acclaimed artistic and scientific genius, but because of its criminal history. Here, Charney examines the criminal biography of the iconic painting with a focus on separating fact from fiction in the story of what is not only the most famous art heist in history, but which is the single most famous theft of all time.
The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece by Laura Cumming
At a nineteenth-century auction, bookseller John Snare discovered a mysterious portrait of a young King Charles I that defied its supposed origins. His investigation led him to believe it was a long-lost work by Diego Velázquez, painted during Prince Charles’s brief visit to Spain. Convinced of its authenticity, Snare risked everything to prove his theory—facing ridicule and isolation, and ultimately sharing Velázquez’s own struggle between devotion to art and loyalty to family.
The Woman Who Stole Vermeer : The True Story of Rose Dugdale and the Russborough House Art Heist by Anthony M. Amore
Amore tells the remarkable true story of Rose Dugdale, the wealthy heiress who became a revolutionary and the only woman ever to pull off a major art heist. Born into privilege, Dugdale turned to Irish Republicanism, led the first aerial terrorist attack in Britain, and in 1974 masterminded the theft of masterpieces by Vermeer, Goya, and Rubens from Russborough House. Her journey from debutante to radical criminal is both astonishing and unforgettable.
–Archana, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian