Description
New York City, 1954.
Two women are found murdered. One is Lorraine Quinn, Cantor Gold’s most recent one-night stand. The other is political power broker and aspiring New York socialite Eve Garraway, a regular client of Cantor’s stolen art trade.
Police nemesis, Lieutenant Norm Huber, wants to pin the murders on Cantor, send her to prison, and put her in the electric chair. He’ll get evidence on her any way he can. Into this cauldron of danger and death come two other women, each with ties to Cantor’s past. One hates her until passion intervenes; the other harbors darkly hidden feelings.
Set during the earliest stirrings of the Homosexual Rights Movement, Cantor begins to question her own tenuous identity, and the trade-offs she must make to get what she wants.
Cantor Gold, dapper butch art thief and smuggler for whom survival is everything, must now grapple with two fronts: surviving the shifting sands of the criminal underworld, and navigating the changing tides of society.
“Ann Aptaker is a literary alchemist. Her crime novels are noir, set in New York in the 1950s—the streets are suitably mean, the characters often beyond redemption. And yet her descriptions of the city—the nights, the rain, the art, the architecture—are as pocked with poetry as the night sky is with stars. And when it comes to character, the books are beautifully observed, even nuanced. If you haven’t met Cantor Gold yet, Murder and Gold is a fine place to start. This series deserves a wide audience!” —ELLEN HART, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master
“Ann Aptaker’s Cantor Gold is one of the most complex, layered, and interesting queer characters I’ve had the good fortune to discover. The books in this series are always intricately plotted, literately written, and so terrifically paced that the reader resents being forced to put the book down for any reason. Aptaker has created a must-read series for me, and I look forward to every new installment.” GREG HERREN, Lambda Literary Award-winning author
“Art thief Cantor Gold’s latest tour de force blends perfect pacing, gritty characters, and seamy atmosphere into a mesmerizing pastiche of depth and complexity. Ann Aptaker’s gutsy new book hits all the right notes. Sexy, stylish and street-smart, Murder and Gold proves once again why noir is the new black.” ANN MCMAN, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of the Evan Reed Mysteries
Native New Yorker ANN APTAKER’S Cantor Gold Crime series has been the recipient of Lambda Literary and Goldie Awards. Her short stories have appeared in two editions of the crime anthology Fedora, Switchblade Magazine’s “Stiletto Heeled” issue, and in the Mickey Finn crime anthology. She is one of six writers invited to provide a novella for the second season of Down & Out Books’ crime series Guns & Tacos. Her flash fiction, “A Night In Town,” appeared in the ezine Punk Soul Poet, and another flash fiction, “Rockin’ Dyke Roll,” is featured in the award-winning anthology Our Happy Hours: LGBT Voices From The Gay Bars. Culminating a career as a curator for museums and galleries, Ann is currently an art writer for various New York clients and is an adjunct professor of art history at the New York Institute of Technology.
