The Gallery Assistant by Kate Belli

 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. 

The Gallery Assistant by Kate Belli is a quietly devastating historical mystery that will hit especially hard for readers who remember September 11th. Belli captures the raw, unsettled emotional landscape of post-9/11 New York with remarkable sensitivity—the grief, the fear, and the sense that the ground itself had shifted. That collective trauma seeps into every page, shaping both character and plot. Particularly powerful is the novel’s unflinching portrayal of self-medicating trauma: the way alcohol and avoidance feel like survival tools at first but slowly become another kind of danger. Belli handles this with care and realism, never sensationalizing the pain. The mystery itself is tightly woven into the historical moment, showing how uncertainty and emotional overload allowed certain crimes to slip through the cracks before society could regain its footing. Once the shock begins to settle, the consequences emerge with chilling clarity. This is an emotional, thoughtful, and haunting read. 

Overall, I rate this novel 4 out of 5 stars.