Published by Constable,
3 November 2016.
ISBN: 978-1-4721-2063-2
3 November 2016.
ISBN: 978-1-4721-2063-2
Lotte
Meerman’s sleuthing habits began when she resolved to find Agnes Visser who
mysteriously disappeared when they were both eight years old. The young Lotte sought to be reunited with
her childhood friend and at the same time hoped to entice her absent father,
himself a detective, back home. Her
exploits, however, did not reunite her estranged parents and, although she
eventually located her young friend, it was too late, the girl had already been
murdered. Now Lotte works as a police
detective in Amsterdam but still feels guilt at having failed to prevent
Agnes’s death. During her previous case
she sustained a gunshot wound to the shoulder and has just returned to duty
after several months away from the job she loves.
The novel opens with Lotte carefully threading
her way through shards of glass that surround the body of a painter and
decorator, Frank Stempel, who has fallen to his death from the seventh floor of
a building. The scene becomes a perfect
metaphor as Lotte realises she must also negotiate her way through the sharp
and strained professional relationships that have greeted her return from sick
leave. Her former partner is scathing in
his criticism of the way she handled her last case, and she finds herself
fighting the rest of her department when she suggests that Stempel’s deadly
fall may have sinister overtones. A
left-luggage ticket from the dead man’s jacket leads Stempel’s widow to make a
grisly discovery at Amsterdam Central Railway Station and increases Lotte’s
suspicion that she is dealing with a murder rather than an accident. Dark secrets hidden for decades are exposed
and more recent criminal puzzles are solved as Lotte pursues the case despite
opposition from her peers and supervisory officer.
The first person narrative voice reveals Lotte’s
complex and highly credible character wracked with self-doubt and anxiety. The immediacy and intimacy of her voice is skilfully
interspersed with a third person narrator and this dual perspective affords the
reader a wider view of events than Lotte’s alone. The two viewpoints give depth and colour to
the story.
Similarly, Amsterdam’s familiar compact city
centre, with its bustle and building work, contrasts with the more open
landscape of the ingeniously reclaimed polder where Lotte believes, “I could
see as far as I wanted, nothing interrupted my view…”. But is Lotte really seeing clearly? The polder, apparently secure within dikes
and armed with pumping stations ready to combat any rise in water levels, can
never be taken for granted; polders, like life, can never be risk-free. The reader soon suspects that the clarity and
peace of the polder beyond Amsterdam conceals tensions and murky events from
the past. Lotte’s instincts have, after
all, been wrong before…
A Cold
Case in Amsterdam Central is the second novel in
Anja de Jager’s Lotte Meerman mysteries and I cannot wait to read the first, A Cold Death in Amsterdam, to see how
this unusual, intriguing and engaging female detective made her debut.
------
Reviewer: Dorothy
Marshall-Gent
Anja de Jager is a
London-based native Dutch speaker who writes in English. She draws inspiration
from cases that her father, a retired police detective, worked on in the
Netherlands.
Currently
she is working on another Lotte Meerman novel, The Murder’s Guide to the Family, which Constable will publish in
2016.
Dorothy
Marshall-Gent worked in the emergency services for twenty years
first as a police officer, then as a paramedic and finally as a fire control
officer before graduating from King’s College, London as a teacher of English
in her mid-forties. She completed a M.A. in Special and Inclusive
Education at the Institute of Education, London and now teaches part-time and
writes mainly about educational issues. Dot sings jazz and country music
and plays guitar, banjo and piano as well as being addicted to reading mystery
and crime fiction.
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