De Cock en de eenzame dood by Peter Römer

(De Cock and the lonely dead)

De Cock series #89

158 pages

Publisher: Fontein

Publishing Date: August 2021

Own

 

Blurb

De Cock wordt naar de Lindengracht geroepen. Hennie, de vrouw die tientallen jaren de aardappelkraam op de markt bestierde, is in haar bed gesmoord met een kussen. Hennie was geen vriendelijk mens, maar wel rijk: achter de aardappelhandel waaraan ze goed verdiende zaten flink wat investeringen, ook in huizen. Naast zakelijke conflicten, zoals met Dennis, een ontevreden huurder met wie Hennie hooglopende ruzie had, denkt De Cock ook aan een motief in de familie. Want Hennie's zoon Tonnie blijkt ook zo zijn redenen te hebben om niet rouwig te zijn om haar dood...

(Translation:

De Cock is summoned to the Lindengracht. Hennie, the woman who for decades ran the potato stall on the market, has been smothered with a pillow in her bed. Hennie wasn’t a friendly person, but she was rich: the potato trade from which she profited nicely let to numerous investments, including in property. Apart from business conflicts such as the one with Dennis, a dissatisfied lodger with whom Hennie had a heated argument, De Cock is also considering a motive within her family. Because Hennie’s son Tonnie also appears to have reasons for not mourning her death…)

 

Review

A few opening notes before I get to my thoughts about this mystery:

• I read the original Dutch version of this book, but I’ll do the review in English. I’m not sure how many (if any) people who read my reviews understand Dutch, but I am sure that if any Dutch speakers do follow my reviews, they’ll be more than proficient in English.
• Peter Römer, the author of this title is not the creator of De Cock. In fact, the first 75 books in this series were written by A.C. Baantjer.
• At least a few of Baantjer’s titles have been published in English. For obvious reasons the name of the main character underwent a small change during the translation process. English-speaking readers know De Cock as DeKok.

I do have a soft spot for this series of books. I can’t say I’ve read them all, or even that I adhered to the order in which they were published, but I can honestly say that I’ve enjoyed every single De Cock mystery I have ever started. There’s something about our main character and his quiet and calm approach to his investigations and his deep-rooted sense of justice that always works for me. It’s the recognisable descriptions of Amsterdam, and the wonderful way in with the author(s) manage to capture characters with just a few pen strokes. And the mysteries always work and always manage to keep me on my toes.

The mystery in The Cock en de eenzame dood was satisfying. With a universally unliked victim, a few likely suspects, and a lack of definitive clues, I enjoyed the puzzle. I almost found my way to the solution but managed to miss the final twist. For me, that amounts to a rewarding mystery and enjoyable reading experience.

I’m now out of unread De Cock mysteries. I’ll be stocking up next time I find myself visiting the Netherlands.

 

Night Market by Daniel Pembrey

Detective Henk van der Pol #2

Publisher: No Exit Press

Buy links: No Exit Press | Amazon | Amazon UK

Blurb

When Henk van der Pol is asked by the Justice Minister to infiltrate a team investigating an online child exploitation network, he can hardly say no - he's at the mercy of prominent government figures in The Hague. But he soon realises the case is far more complex than he was led to believe... Picking up from where The Harbour Master ended, this new investigation sees Detective Van der Pol once again put his life on the line as he wades the murky waters between right and wrong in his search for justice.

Sometimes, to catch the bad guys, you have to think like one. . .

My thoughts

“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you…” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Let me start with a warning: I feel you should really read The Harbour Master, the prequel to Night Market, before picking this book up. More often than not when I read a later book in a series I get away with it. There may be one or two nuances I miss, but overall my lack of prior knowledge doesn’t bother me. The experience while reading Night Market was almost the exact opposite. I was, at times painfully, aware that I just didn’t know enough.

Don’t get me wrong. Even with my less than good understanding of exactly what was going on, this was a riveting page-turner of a story. And there’s a lot to praise this book for. Henk van der Pol is a fascinating and well rounded protagonist. He is very real, at times painfully so. I didn’t always agree with his decisions and actions but I did understand where he was coming from, what drove him. The secondary characters are given as much attention and most of them are memorable, although none more than Henk himself.

Amsterdam was described really well in this book, even if sections of it took place in parts of the city that have been reclaimed from the water since I left. The author's biography told me he lives (part-time) in Amsterdam and that didn't surprise me at all. The way my hometown came to life on the pages would be hard to achieve by anyone who hadn't spend a significant amount of time there.

This is not what I would call a linear mystery or thriller in which a crime leads to clues which eventually provide a solution. This thriller presents us with a conglomerate of crimes and conspiracies which may or may not be connected to each other. We move back and forth and an answer here only leads to more and different questions over there.

That of course is what made this book almost impossible to put down. There aren’t any real quiet moments in this story. The narrative continuously pushes the characters forwards, into at times impossible situations, and the reader has no choice but to follow, even if it is into nasty territory. Because this story does deal with the ugly underbelly of our society. While nothing is depicted in graphic detail, Night Market does deal with subjects that may be hard to read about for some. Of course, it is exactly the nastiness of the crimes Henk is trying to solve that it’s almost impossible to put the book down as he comes ever closer to the truth. Still, no matter how much the book hooked me, I can’t help wondering how much more I would have gotten out of it if I’d read its prequel first.

So, when I give this book stars it’s in the full knowledge that I’m probably subtracting one star for something that’s not actually the book’s or the author’s fault. And I promise right now that I will read The Harbour Master before the third Henk van der Pol Investigation book is released.

On a personal note I have to admit that Night Market depicts Amsterdam as darker, and a lot more violent than I (like to) remember it.

I received my copy of this book from No Exit Press through Real Readers.

The Light of Amsterdam by David Park

The Light of Amsterdam by David Parks

Pages: 371

Date: June 29, 2016

Grade: 4+

Details: Book Club Read

Paperback / Own

The blurb:

It is December in Belfast, Christmas is approaching and three sets of people are about to make their way to Amsterdam.

Alan, a university art teacher stands watching the grey sky blacken waiting for George Best's funeral cortege to pass. He will go to Amsterdam to see Bob Dylan in concert but also in the aftermath of his divorce, in the hope that the city which once welcomed him as a young man and seemed to promise a better future, will reignite those sustaining memories. He doesn't yet know that his troubled teenage son Jack will accompany his pilgrimage.

Karen is a single mother struggling to make ends meet by working in a care home and cleaning city centre offices. She is determined to give her daughter the best wedding that she can. But as she boards the plane with her daughter's hen party she will soon be shocked into questioning where her life of sacrifices has brought her.

Meanwhile middle-aged couple, Marion and Richard are taking a break from running their garden centre to celebrate Marion's birthday. In Amsterdam, Marion's anxieties and insecurities about age, desire and motherhood come to the surface and lead her to make a decision that threatens to change the course of her marriage.

As these people brush against each other in the squares, museums and parks of Amsterdam, their lives are transfigured as they encounter the complexities of love in a city that challenges what has gone before. Tender and humane, and elevating the ordinary to something timeless and important, The Light of Amsterdam is a novel of compassion and rare dignity.

My thoughts:

“She wondered if it was ever possible in the world to be anything other than on your own and whether that wasn’t the best way to be.”

This is a not altogether nice look at the inner lives of the three featured characters. There’s Alan, who cheated on his wife and now finds himself having to entertain his sixteen year old son during a weekend in Amsterdam. Karen is a single mother who’s sacrificed a lot to give her daughter everything she wanted only to be faced with what she considers the ultimate betrayal by that daughter. Marion is a middle aged woman with doubts about her husband’s loyalty who decides to take rather drastic (and I might add overly dramatic) action to deal with the situation. Because we see events through their eyes only, are living in their heads, and hearing only their thoughts, we are confronted with the inherent selfishness we’re probably all guilty off but prefer not to acknowledge. On more than one occasion I found myself thinking ‘you’re just not that nice’ only to realise that I might well have reacted in the same way and thought the same thoughts when faced with the situation that character found themselves in.

Reading this at times brutally honest book about the shortcomings all of us have in common made me realise that I do prefer it when stories portray people in a somewhat idolised fashion—the way we ought to behave and think rather than the way we all too often do. Something else that felt very realistic and yet threw me at times were the repetitions in what people thought, sometimes showing up as complete and literal reproductions of sentences that had been used before. While I completely agree that our thoughts often run in circles and are repetitive, it’s not something I can read without thinking ‘you could have phrased that differently this time’.

I’m feeling somewhat ambiguous about this book. On the one hand the issues the three main characters are struggling with aren’t earth-shattering—quite the opposite in fact. I mean the fast majority of teenagers are withdrawn and sulky, regardless of whether or not their parents are still together. Most children will want to meet and get to know the parent who abandoned them before they were born, given half a chance just as most relationships will become less sexually active over time. So part of me was constantly thinking ‘get over it already, neither you nor your situation is anything special’. On the other hand, it was the fact that David Parks managed to convincingly portray how those run of the mill concerns can mess with our heads and our lives that really impressed me. And I think he is spot on when he portrays the loneliness we can feel even while surrounded by thousands of others and spending time with those we’re supposed to be close to and comfortable with.

The fabulous and entirely accurate descriptions of Amsterdam in this book delighted me. The author has either been there or did a fabulous job researching the city because I always knew exactly where in Amsterdam his characters were. Even if I had hated the story (which I didn’t) that sense of being in the city where I was born and grew up was fantastic.

Overall this was a very well written book that managed to captivate me despite the fact that I kept on losing my patience with the characters.

THE MINIATURIST by Jessie Burton

THE MINIATURIST by Jessie Burton

 

Pages: 424

Date: September 27, 2015

Grade: 4-

Details: Reading Group Read

Paperback / Own

The blurb:

"There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed..."

On a brisk autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman arrives in Amsterdam to begin a new life as the wife of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt. But her new home, while splendorous, is not welcoming. Johannes is kind yet distant, always locked in his study or at his warehouse office-leaving Nella alone with his sister, the sharp-tongued and forbidding Marin.

But Nella's world changes when Johannes presents her with an extraordinary wedding gift: a cabinet-sized replica of their home. To furnish her gift, Nella engages the services of a miniaturist-an elusive and enigmatic artist whose tiny creations mirror their real-life counterparts in eerie and unexpected ways . . .

Johannes' gift helps Nella to pierce the closed world of the Brandt household. But as she uncovers its unusual secrets, she begins to understand-and fear-the escalating dangers that await them all. In this repressively pious society where gold is worshipped second only to God, to be different is a threat to the moral fabric of society, and not even a man as rich as Johannes is safe. Only one person seems to see the fate that awaits them. Is the miniaturist the key to their salvation . . . or the architect of their destruction?

My thoughts:

The book starts with the funeral of an unnamed but, according to the narrator, unpopular person as observed by an unnamed woman who, after other attendees have left, leaves a miniature of a house at the grave before deciding she has to leave.

When the story proper start it is 1686, about three months prior to the funeral described in the prologue and what we get of course are the events leading up to that hasty funeral, be it they’re no longer narrated from the same perspective. The full story comes to us courtesy of Petronella Oortman – Brandt, who arrives in Amsterdam to join her new husband, full of hopes and dreams only to soon discover that reality doesn’t live up them. Nobody in her new family is exactly who or what she expected to find and it’s only a matter of days before her expectations are drowned in realities and secrets.

The gift of the miniature house is strange in and of itself. Nella would rather welcome her husband to their wedding bed – as much as the idea scares her – than be given a toy. But as soon as the miniatures to fill the house start arriving it becomes clear to both the reader and Nella that something mysterious is going on. The person making the miniatures seems to know things about the inhabitants of the house on the Herengracht which nobody should be able to know. What’s more, the miniatures are foreshadowing events in a most macabre way. It isn’t long before Nella is torn between obsession and repulsion, both of which are fuelled by the fact that the miniaturist remains elusive while apparently present everywhere.

What follows is a rather sad tale of what happens when social mores are in conflict with personal preferences, especially during a time in which religion more or less determined how people could and couldn’t behave. It is more than that though, this is also the story of Nella’s coming of age – as her new life falls apart around her ears Nell has to learn new skills, find new strengths and reassess many of the preconceptions she grew up with.

For me personally the most fascinating part of this book was spending time in Amsterdam in the 17^th century. So much and yet so little has changed. You could walk through Amsterdam’s city centre today with this book as your guide and the canals and roads would still be more or less as described on these pages. I also learned one or two things about the history of Amsterdam I hadn’t been aware off. For example, I didn’t know that in the past personal addresses were distinguished by markings on the houses – such as a sun for the miniaturist.

I also liked that the story deals with topics that were (and for some still are) controversial up until recently. I don’t want to go into exactly what those topics are because that would give away too much of the story, but it was fascinating, if difficult, to look at them from an historic perspective.

I find myself a bit torn about the way language was used in this book. While the formal way in which the story was told made it feel more authentic and period appropriate, it also became a bit overwhelming. And while I personally had no issues with the use of (old) Dutch words and terms in the book, I can easily imagine that it might be tiresome for non-Dutch speakers to have to refer to the glossary at the end on several occasions.

I did have one huge issue with this book and that’s the way it ended. While this book was well written, mesmerising and intriguing, the ending left me unsatisfied. I always enjoy it when a book allows me to embroider on the story after the last chapter. This book however left me with too many unanswered questions. I had no idea what the future might look like for any of the characters or how they might be able to pull any sort of future off for themselves. Not to mention that the main mystery in this book never really got resolved. Again, it’s impossible to say more without resorting to spoilers, so I won’t, but it did leave me feeling disappointed.

My overall verdict therefore is as follows. This was a well written, well research and fascinating story, although not always easy to read. It also left me feeling somewhat short changed by the time the story ended, which is a shame because until that point this book was heading for a solid five star rating.

DIRTY DEEDS

TITLE: DIRTY DEEDS

AUTHOR: S.E. JAKES

Pages: 79

Date: 28/01/2014

Grade: 4+

Details: Received from Riptide Publishing

            Through Love Romances and More

            Reviews

Own / Kindle

The blurb:

“Two seasoned operatives finally meet their match: each other. 

Cillian works for the mysterious Special Branch 20: an organization that runs black ops commissioned by the British government. His specialty is deep undercover assignments with virtually no support. He’s been alone for so long that he no longer knows anything else. 

Mal’s also used to being alone. Wanted in several states and even more countries, he’s not allowed in the vicinity of any of his former Navy SEAL teammates. And his current assignment is to track Cillian in order to discover the spook’s endgame. Except he’s no longer sure which one of them is getting played. 

Cillian isn’t about to let the mission that’s consumed him for the past several years crumble because an outsider is poking around where he doesn’t belong. But Mal forces his way through Cillian’s defences—and into his heart—exposing a devastating betrayal that could destroy them both.”

---------------------------------------------------------

My thoughts:

The first word I see when I open this book is ‘Amsterdam’; a great start considering I lived there for over 30 years. I have to admit that even though the city isn’t described in any detail and I couldn’t tell you exactly where the story plays out, the fact that it’s set there did give this book an extra edge.

Not that this story wasn’t edgy enough without the added interest. In fact, I think the word edgy was invented to describe books like this. Mal and Cillian, two undercover agents, are both chasing the same man be it for different and personal reasons.

While Mal knows who Cillian is and more or less what he is up to, Cillian has no idea who or what Mal is. When contact between the two men is established it takes place almost exclusively through Instant Messaging. It is also highly sexual in nature, with both of them vying for domination over the other while secretly graving the potential of submission.

Mal may have some advantages over Cillian because he knows more about his opponent than Cillian knows about him, neither of them knows enough to prevent shocking revelations. Revelations that come after the men have found a need for each other they can neither explain nor deny, no matter how much they might want to. Revelations that will shock the reader and create an urgent need for the next book in what appears to be a trilogy.

This was a very well written story. The tension starts on the first page and doesn’t let up for a moment. In fact, that tension had only gotten stronger by the time I read the last word in this novella. And it is a tension that exists on all levels of this story. It is never completely clear who knows what. There is the mystery as to who is killing Cillian’s informers. And then there is the sexual tension between these two men; a tension so hot it steams of the page both during their online encounters and when they’re together.

These two men are very similar and more than a match for each other. They also seem to be made for each other, if only they weren’t on opposite sides of the same mission. I can’t wait to see how the rest of this story is going to unfold and can only hope it won’t be too long until ‘Dirty Lies’ comes out.

After I requested this book for review but before I read it I discovered this book ties into previous titles by this author – The Hell or High Water series – which I haven’t read. Don’t let that stop you from picking up this book right now. At no point while reading this novella did I feel as if I was missing vital information. In fact, if I hadn’t seen somebody else mention this fact in a review, I would never have guessed there were earlier, connected books.

I also didn’t realise this wasn’t a stand-alone title when I requested it. The way this story ends makes that fact perfectly clear though. The author leaves us with an unexpected and shocking cliff-hanger, but it wasn’t one that bothered me (and trust me I’m not a fan of cliff-hangers in general).

Although I’m more than ready to find out what happens next and can’t wait for the sequels, I have to say the story ended with perfect timing. My curiosity is well and truly awakened and my mind is running riot, trying to come up with all the possible future scenarios. Somehow I feel that whatever my mind may conjure up for me, S.E. Jakes will still manage to surprise me.