As funding gets cut off and climate change gets worse, all our cultural treasures are at risk of being stolen by kleptocrats, sold off by bankrupt cities, or at the very least, environmentally damaged in heat waves. So while we still have museums, why not read some museum-based mysteries and thrillers! here are four excellent recent and upcoming novels featuring cultural institutions and plenty of crimes.
Heather McGowan, Friends of the Museum
(Washington Square Press)
Aside from having the best title in this list, Heather McGowan’s novel is laugh-to-keep-from-crying levels of funny, a biting satire of the compromises we make to keep the things we believe in going, and how we lose ourselves along the way (and also, why we should all be able to have FEDERAL FUNDING FOR CULTURE instead of relying on donors. RIP, NEA grants.)
Maha Khan Phillips, The Museum Detective
(Soho)
This book is so cool! As The Museum Detective begins, an archaeologist gets a call from the police to identify a body—specifically, a mummy preserved in a highly unusual sarcophagus that just about everyone would like to get their hands on, for profit or for politics.
Poupeh Missaghi, Sound Museum
(Coffee House)
Why should male torturers get all the credit? In Poupeh Missaghi’s parody of corporate feminism and the misplaced morality of professionalism, the women holding up a brutal regime would like their contributions acknowledged, too, thank you very much. And one has created a strange new archive dedicated to analyzing the sounds of torture, which she would love to tell you all about. Humorous enough to avoid feeling heavy-handed, Sound Museum may challenge the squeamish, but even if it takes several sessions to get through Poupeh Missaghi’s Kafka-esque tone poem, it’s well worth the effort.
Kosoko Jackson, The Macabre
(Harper Voyager)
This book is batshit, in the best way. When Jackson’s artist protagonist heads to London to take up a prestigious residency, he has no idea that the British Museum plans to use his talents towards a rather different end: he must work with the Museum’s eccentric (and super hot) staff to locate and destroy nine malevolent paintings first created by his distant ancestor, and potentially able to destroy the entire world. I really enjoyed Kosoko Jackson’s Disneyland-set post-apocalyptic thriller Survive the Dome, and his new book promises just as immersive a storytelling environment, this time with a unique magic system that would lend itself easily towards being adapted *cough cough*.
