The Gallery Assistant

Author: Kate Belli Title: The Gallery Assistant Publisher: Atria Date Published: 10/14/2025

Read Dates: 09/12/2025- 09/13/2025
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

 📖 I received a gifted e-book ARC. The following is my honest review✍🏻

The Gallery Assistant is a single POV thriller set in New York in the Autumn/Winter of 2001. Chloe, an assistant at an art gallery, has next to no memories of the night before; she went to a party for an up-and-coming artist and somehow woke up in her bed the next morning. When she goes in to work the next day, the police are waiting to question her- the artist has been found murdered and Chloe might be the last person who saw her alive. If only she could remember what she saw! This was an excellent thriller by a new-to-me author. There were plenty of twists and turns to keep me guessing, and I enjoyed watching Chloe piece together what happened that night and all the players in the mystery. ⚠️ CW/TW ⚠️ This is a thriller set in New York shortly after 9/11, and references to/flashbacks depicting the attack and its aftermath can be difficult to read.

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.