Kate Belli Books in Order

If you want the full Genevieve and Daniel story: Deception by Gaslight → Betrayal on the Bowery → Treachery on Tenth Street → Opulence and Ashes
If you want her best Gilded Age entry point: Deception by Gaslight
If you want a standalone, modern suspense novel: The Gallery Assistant

Kate Belli writes mysteries and thrillers, but the road to fiction ran through art history first. She holds a PhD in art history and has worked as an antiques appraiser, a museum curator, a college professor, and now a gallery director and faculty member at a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania.

She has said she loved stories long before publication entered the picture. She wrote short fiction through high school, college, and the years after, but did not start thinking seriously about writing professionally until her thirties.

One novel gave her the nudge.

Belli has pointed to Julia Quinn's On the Way to the Wedding, part of the Bridgerton series, as the book that made her want to try a novel of her own. During graduate school, fiction became a break from academic work and a way to do something more openly creative with the history she was already studying.

That mix of scholarship and storytelling shaped her first big project. While working as a curator at the Brooklyn Historical Society, she began imagining a Gilded Age New York story with glamour, social rules, and women pushing against them. What started as historical romance gradually turned into the Gilded Gotham mysteries, which helps explain why the books pair murder plots with a strong romantic thread.

The series begins with Deception by Gaslight, where reporter Genevieve Stewart chases a jewel thief across 1888 Manhattan and runs straight into murder. Betrayal on the Bowery, Treachery on Tenth Street, and Opulence and Ashes widen the map from docks and dive bars to artists' studios, mission houses, and Fifth Avenue drawing rooms. Readers tend to come to these books for the pace, the city atmosphere, and the way Belli lets class, money, and ambition complicate every case.

New York is one of her great subjects.

In her fiction, the city can look polished and bright from one block and rough, hungry, and dangerous from the next. The art world also keeps finding its way onto the page, which makes sense given her training and day job.

That interest is front and center in The Gallery Assistant, a standalone thriller set in New York in the months after 9/11. The book follows Chloe Harlow, a young gallery assistant trying to piece together a missing night after an up-and-coming artist is murdered. It shows that even when Belli moved from Gilded Age mystery to contemporary suspense, she kept returning to familiar territory: art, secrecy, status, and the stories people tell to protect themselves.

Her life off the page sounds busy in a very real-world way. She lives in Central Pennsylvania with her husband and son, has also lived in places including Florence, Brooklyn, the Deep South, and northern France, and still talks about travel, museums, and local food with obvious pleasure. She is also a yoga teacher and a longtime runner who has completed several marathons.

That combination of research, movement, and curiosity gives her books their shape.