Novel Museum Secrets

Museums are fascinating places, both as a visitor and behind the scenes. While there are lots of books about mysteries taking place there for younger readers, I've found a few of the more popular ones for adults.

Unless you've been under a rock for the past 15 years, you've probably heard of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. In it, Robert Langdon, a symbologist, races across Europe to uncover a biblical secret and the society that keeps it. The plot starts in the Louvre, and incorporates many other historical places and artworks. The book was made into a passable movie, anchored by the excellent Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou  and featuring Ian McKellen as a delightfully dirty old man.

For a more intellectual take on religious conspiracies, there's the new translation of Javier Sierra's The Master of the Prado. A fictional autobiography, a young journalism student is befriended by an older man who shows him the masterpieces of the art museum of the title. Mostly, he focuses on the so-called "arcanon," or works that hint at secret histories and supernatural doings. The student gets more and more entranced by these paintings and the man who illuminates them for him, and gets threats from a sinister Mister X for his trouble. The plot is propulsive and  the mysteries and conspiracies are fascinating.

Linda Fairstein, author of the Alexandra Cooper mysteries set in New York, has penned one of the series set in the museum world. In The Bone Vault, a body much more recent than that of the Egyptian princess ostensibly in a stone sarcophagus stuck in customs has Cooper and her cohorts entangled in the cut-throat business of antiquities and scholarship. Will they become collateral damage in the battle between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History? Could be, as the collectors, administrators, and donors of these venerable institutions have done far worse things than stonewall pesky cops in their pursuit of the unique.

Got a favorite book set in a museum? Got a favorite museum you'd like to see in a novel? Join the conversation in the comments below.