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davidwright's review
4.0
Charismatic alpha male Abe Rogge is found dead in his room, every bone in his face broken. His sister is in the room below, and an admiring roomer above, while police stand outside as riots scrimmage around the Summer streets. He appears to have been killed by a spiked ball, but nobody saw a thing. The fourth entry in van de Wetering’s Amsterdam Cops series opens like a classic locked room mystery, but these mysteries are anything but traditional. I’ve always enjoyed crime novels that aren’t really about the solution to the crime – James Sallis’ Lew Griffin books, for instance – and though it is interesting to find out how the victim died, the real attraction of these books is just spending time with detectives Grijpstra and de Gier, and their aging commisaris boss and philosophical sensei. Van de Wetering, who died recently, is more like Simenon than McBain, but brings his own whimsical, large hearted version of that hardboiled weltschmerz. There is a laid-back, offbeat humor here that just makes me smile, deeply, although it is rather hard to capture here. I re-read this one recently while sailing up Alaska’s inside passage, and that was pretty much heaven. Newcomers should start with Outsider in Amsterdam.
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