Sand Castles - Hardcover

Freeling, Nicolas

3.55

31 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892963727 ISBN 13: 9780892963720

Publisher: Mysterious Pr, 1990

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

The resurrected Amsterdam detective Peter Van der Valk returns to the crime beat to discover some upstanding citizens paying a blackmailer for photographs of them lying down--with women other than their wives

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

The novelist Nicolas Freeling, who has died aged 76, was best known for his Van der Valk detective stories and the two television series they inspired.

He was the most thoroughly European of British crime writers. In addition to the Amsterdam detective Piet Van der Valk, whom he rashly killed off in 1972, he created a series of novels based on the more reflective provincial French Inspector Henri Castang. He also wrote exceptional, often underrated, single novels, again set in Europe. He published 37 works of fiction in all, and four miscellaneous works.

From Publishers Weekly:

Freeling introduced Inspector Van der Valk in 1964 ( Love In Amsterdam ) and in his tenth book ( A Long Silence ) killed him off. The inspector's return here is sure to rally old fans. The unspecified time sounds modern--"The bawdy houses advertise safe sex"--as Van der Valk, now a middle-aged, mostly desk-bound Commissaris, vacations in northern Holland with his French-born wife, Arlette. Through a fluke, Van der Valk uncovers a small-town kiddy-porn ring, and does a one-man good-cop-bad-cop routine. At the German border he and Arlette meet a friendly Dutch-born entrepreneur whose old-fashioned jingoistic politics turn sinister after the apparent murder (the body vanishes) of a possible police agent. Van der Valk and Arlette face danger and a nasty American evangelist before a couple of villains are neutralized. Like his idiosyncratic hero and heroine--he bashes the Dutch, she the French, for example--Freeling rewards with his oblique, subtly comic style.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.