Alex Connor Books in Order

If you want the classic art thriller: The Other Rembrandt /The Rembrandt Secret → The Hogarth Conspiracy / Legacy of Blood → The Caravaggio Conspiracy
If you want dark Venice atmosphere: Blood on the Water → Isle of the Dead
If you want relics and ruthless art world rivalry: Unearthing the Bones → Memory of Bones → The Bosch Deception
If you want stronger historical fiction: Artemisia → The Wolves of Venice
If you want the newest standalone: A Wreath of Serpents

Alex Connor, who also writes as Alexandra Connor, was born in England and spent much of her childhood in London. Art arrived early. She has said that seeing Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus at the National Gallery when she was six gave her the first real jolt, the sense that painting could feel alive and urgent rather than distant or polite.

That stayed with her.

Before books took over, Connor moved through a string of very different jobs. She worked as a photographic model, wrote journalism, spent time in a Bond Street gallery, and built a practical, close up knowledge of how the art world looks from the inside. That mix matters in her fiction. Her stories know the glamour, but they also know the money, the ego, the nervous deals, and the people who live by what hangs on a wall.

The bigger turning point came after she was stalked and violently attacked in London. During recovery from throat surgery, she began to paint seriously and started writing as well. Connor has described that period as the moment things clicked into place. Instead of drifting toward a creative life, she found it in a hard, abrupt way, then got on with learning the craft.

She didn't drift into art. She fought her way to it.

Her books tend to sit where art history and suspense meet. The Other Rembrandt /The Rembrandt Secret digs into a buried scandal around Rembrandt. The Hogarth Conspiracy / Legacy of Blood ties William Hogarth to a dangerous royal secret. The Caravaggio Conspiracy and Isle of the Dead move between old crimes and modern killings, with missing paintings, collectors, dealers, and investigators all circling the same prize. Readers usually come for the mystery, then stay for the art.

Connor also writes straight historical fiction. Artemisia turns to Artemisia Gentileschi and the cost of being a gifted woman in a world built for men. The Wolves of Venice heads into 16th century Venice, where artists, merchants, spies, and survivors move through a city that looks dazzling on the surface and brutal underneath. Even when the settings change, her interests are steady, power, obsession, reputation, violence, and the strange way old stories keep leaking into the present.

Old masters, bad secrets, modern consequences.

That mix has given her a wide body of work, from early art writing such as Rembrandt's Monkey and Private View to later thrillers and historical novels. Isle of the Dead won the Rome Prize in 2017, and her books have been translated into many languages. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Those are the public facts. The more personal through line is simpler, she keeps returning to artists who were brilliant, difficult, misunderstood, or all three at once.

Connor lives in Brighton, England, and painting still runs alongside the writing. She has exhibited her art, worked as an arts presenter on television and radio, and continues to speak publicly about artists and the lives behind the work. That feels right for an author whose novels are never just about pictures. They are about the people who make them, the people who sell them, and the trouble that starts when the past refuses to stay still.