Ann Aptaker Books in Order

Ann Aptaker is a native New Yorker, and New York City is built into her imagination. She was born and raised there, went to elementary school in Brooklyn, and later attended high school in Manhattan at a flexible school that fit her life as a theater kid.

Long before her name appeared on crime novels, she spent decades in the art world. Aptaker worked as an exhibition designer and curator for museums and galleries, and the shows she organized drew notice from major arts publications. She has also written about art for New York clients and taught art history at the New York Institute of Technology.

Writing came first, though.

In interviews, Aptaker has said that when she was in high school she could imagine two futures: journalism, which she loved, or writing the kinds of novels her father liked to read. In a way, she ended up doing both. Her fiction has the curiosity of a reporter, but it also has the mood, pace, and danger of classic crime stories.

One job mattered more than most when she started shaping her fiction. She spent time working for a private investigations firm and saw the justice system up close. That experience helped push her toward crime writing and helped her build one of her signature ideas: the law is not always where justice lives.

That idea runs straight through her Cantor Gold novels, which begin with Criminal Gold and continue through books like Tarnished Gold, Genuine Gold, Flesh and Gold, Murder and Gold, Hunting Gold, and Gold for the Dead. Cantor is a lesbian art thief and smuggler moving through postwar New York, and Aptaker uses that setup to bring together the things she knows best: the city, the art world, architecture, and the pressure of living outside respectable rules. Readers who like noir, historical detail, and sharp-edged women tend to find a lot to enjoy there.

Aptaker has said Cantor started in her mind as an investigator. After seeing more of the real machinery of law and courts, she realized the character belonged on the other side of it. That change gave the series its charge. Cantor is not a tidy detective. She is a survivor, and that makes the books feel rougher, stranger, and more alive.

The awards followed in plain view. Criminal Gold was a Goldie finalist, and Tarnished Gold went on to win both a Lambda Literary Award and a Goldie. Aptaker has also written shorter fiction for anthologies and magazines, including Fedora, Switchblade, Mickey Finn, and the flash pieces “A Night In Town” and “Rockin’ Dyke Roll.” She contributed writing to the children’s science series Space Racers, which tells you something about her range.

She has not stayed in one corner of history, either. With A Crime of Secrets, she introduced Fin Donner and Devorah Longstreet, a new pair of investigators in New York City in 1899. And with A Taco, A T-Bird, A Beretta and One Furious Night, she showed she could also write a lean, modern crime novella driven by revenge.

When she is not writing about smugglers, killers, crooked power, or women who know how to keep moving, Aptaker still circles back to art. She has said she also has a soft spot for ice cream and old movies, which somehow feels exactly right for a writer whose books are full of history, style, and trouble.