Hunting Gold (Paperback or Softback)

Lambda Literary Award-winning author returns with a stunning mystery proving that Noir is the new black.

A golden city of prosperity, energy, the exciting engine of the American Dream. Just underneath, though, is a dark city, with darker ambitions. This is the world of Cantor Gold, dapper art thief and smuggler, who has her own way of securing the rewards of the American Dream. In the conformist 1950s, when same-sex romance was illegal, Cantor decides that any Law that condemns her as a criminal just for her love of women is not a Law she owes any allegiance to. As an outlaw, she thrives earning fistfuls of cash and living life on her own terms. But someone wants to take it all away. Someone wants to rob Cantor of everything: her success in the underworld, her freedom, her life.

Predators are out to destroy Cantor: the cops who violently raid the Green Door Club, Cantor's favorite watering hole, where the lights are low and the women are willing; and worse, an unknown predator who threatens to destroy Cantor's life, even destroy the lives of people close to her.

Murder is one of the weapons in the hunter's arsenal, involving Cantor in the dangerous fate of each corpse. Another is the taunting, threatening notes that turn up on the corpses or at Cantor's door or at the door of people she visits. And then there are the phone calls and a disguised voice. Someone is invading every minute of Cantor Gold's life.

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. 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.