‘Little Sister' by David Hewson

Published by Macmillan,
5 May 2016.
ISBN 978-1-4472-9339-2

Another exciting and frightening adventure for the Dutch detective Pieter Vos and his team at Marnixstraat in Amsterdam - Laura Bakker and Dirk van der Berg.  It begins is on the island of Marken, which was produced by the elaborate water workings around the Zuider Zee.  It is approached via a single track over a bridge and is, therefore, a very good place to put an institution for disturbed children.  Sisters Kim and Mia have been here since they were 11 after being convicted of a murder; now, at 21, there is the possibility of freeing them to a secured facility in Amsterdam where they can learn about the outside world.  There had been three of them - triplets - but Jo had been murdered with their parents just before the girls killed a man.

The moment that the two leave the island there are explosive results.  Vos is the investigator when the 2 girls and the nurse who drove them off the island disappear.   A bewildering sequence of events follows with people attacked, bodies found and possible police corruption.  Only at the end do past and present events enmesh in a coherent explanation.  The story is is told from multiple viewpoints including that of the 2 girls.   This is, of course, an accomplished story.

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Reviewer: Jennifer S Palmer

This is the third outing for Detective Vos.

David Hewson was born in Yorkshire in 1953 and left school at the age of seventeen to work as a cub reporter on one of the smallest evening newspapers in the country in Scarborough. Eight years later he was a staff reporter on The Times in London, covering news, business and latterly working as arts correspondent. He worked on the launch of the Independent and was a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times for a decade before giving up journalism entirely in 2005 to focus on writing fiction. His novels have been translated into a wide range of languages, from Italian to Japanese, and his debut work, Semana Santa, set in Holy Week Spain, was filmed with Mira Sorvino and Olivier Martinez. Semana Santa won the WH Smith Fresh Talent award for one of the best debut novels of the year in 1996.and was later made into a movie starring Mira Sorvino. Four standalone works followed before A Season for the Dead, the first in a series set in Italy. He has featured regularly on the speaker lists of leading international book events, including the Melbourne and Ottawa writers' festivals, the Harrogate Crime Festival, Thrillerfest, Bouchercon and Left Coast Crime. He has taught at writing schools around the world and is a regular faculty member for the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference in Corte Madera, California, where he has worked alongside writers such as Martin Cruz Smith and Michael Connelly.

davidhewson.com

 

Jennifer Palmer Throughout my reading life crime fiction has been a constant interest; I really enjoyed my 15 years as an expatriate in the Far East, the Netherlands & the USA but occasionally the solace of closing my door to the outside world and sitting reading was highly therapeutic. I now lecture to adults on historical topics including Famous Historical Mysteries.