This twisty and sinister thriller follows a New York art gallery assistant reckoning with her past and now trapped in a web of deceit after an up-and-coming painter is murdered—perfect for fans of Katy Hays and Julia Bartz.
November 2001: Chloe Harlow wakes up late, with hazy memories of the party the night before but no recollection of how she got back to her Brooklyn apartment. Ever since the terrifying and catastrophic terrorist attack, it seems she has been on a collision course with destruction.
When she finally arrives at the exclusive Upper East Side art gallery where she works, she is immediately called into her boss’s office. A pair of NYPD detectives greet her, also very curious to know how her evening ended…because the host of the party, a rising painter and the gallery’s newest artist, is dead.
Navigating both the sophisticated high-stakes art world and her personal life in burgeoning Williamsburg, Chloe struggles to piece together a complete picture of that lost night. As she digs deeper, inconsistencies emerge between what she remembers and what people tell her actually happened, and more questions are raised. Everything begins to feel like a conspiracy and maybe it is. Because Chloe is the only one who glimpses the secrets the murdered artist left behind, and the closer she gets to the truth…the more deadly it becomes.
My Review
⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 (3.5 stars)
The Gallery Assistant by Kate Belli is one of those books that immediately drops you into a heavy, emotionally charged moment in history and doesn’t let you look away. Set in the months after 9/11, it follows Chloe, a young art gallery assistant in New York, as she tries to piece together the fragmented memories of a night that ended in murder. Before diving in, I strongly recommend checking the trigger warnings—this one touches on a lot of difficult and distressing themes.
The story does a really effective job of capturing the unease and grief of that post-9/11 world. The “lost night” plot device kept me hooked and constantly questioning who I could trust. I was suspicious of everyone—everyone—yet still managed to be surprised by the final reveal. The art world setting added a fascinating layer of glamour and moral decay, and the ending, while not exactly satisfying in the conventional sense, felt true to the story’s time and tone.
That said, I did get confused at times. There were so many characters introduced, and some of the scenes jumped around in a way that made it hard to follow. The pacing was also quite slow for most of the book, which sometimes dulled the tension that the premise promised.
Still, Belli’s writing captures that hollow, haunted feeling of early-2000s New York beautifully. The Gallery Assistant is a dark, slow-burn psychological thriller about memory, guilt, and survival in a city still reeling—and while I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready to “go back there,” I can’t deny that it left a mark.
You must be logged in to post a comment.