Detective Pieter Vos
4 total works
By the bestselling author of The Killing, Sleep Baby Sleep is the fourth novel in David Hewson's gripping Detective Pieter Vos series set in Amsterdam.
Annie Schrijver is just twenty-two-years-old. She works in the picturesque Albert Cuyp flower market where her father has a stall. Brimming with personality, she’s always been popular with the customers. But then she goes missing, only to be found barely alive, tied to a stone angel in a graveyard, surrounded by a ring of fire. Her body contains traces of a drug which connect the police to a previous case: the Sleeping Beauty murders.
But Annie seems to have been the lucky one, as a body is found nearby, freshly tattooed with three words: Sleep Baby Sleep.
It is summer and Amsterdam is full of tourists drunk or high on all that it has to offer. The drum of music from a make-shift DJ booth near the zoo is deafening, and empty frites cones and beer cans litter the streets. But the atmosphere has sinister undercurrents as a killer is at work in a city where crime pays and tensions run high.
Detective Pieter Vos knows that if he is to outwit the murderer, he will need to employ everything he has to avert a greater tragedy.
Anneliese Vos, sixteen-year-old daughter of Amsterdam detective, Pieter Vos, disappeared three years ago in mysterious circumstances. Her distraught father's desperate search reveals nothing and results in his departure from the police force.
Pieter now lives in a broken down houseboat in the colourful Amsterdam neighbourhood of the Jordaan. One day, while Vos is wasting time at the Rijksmuseum staring at a doll's house that seems to be connected in some way to the case, Laura Bakker, a misfit trainee detective from the provinces, visits him. She's come to tell him that Katja Prins, daughter of an important local politician, has gone missing in circumstances similar to Anneliese.
In the company of the intriguing and awkward Bakker, Vos finds himself drawn back into the life of a detective. A life which he thought he had left behind. Hoping against hope that somewhere will lay a clue to the fate of Anneliese, the daughter he blames himself for losing . . .
Her death will haunt us forever. Now the price must be paid.
Kim and Mia Timmers were just eleven years old when their family was killed. The sisters were accused of murdering the lead singer of a world-famous pop band in the Dutch fishing village of Volendam, believing him to be responsible for their family's deaths. The evidence seemed irrefutable at the time and the sisters were imprisoned in Marken, a local psychiatric institution. Now, ten years later, they are due for release.
Pieter Vos, a detective with the Amsterdam police, is given cause to re-open the case when the girls disappear along with the nurse responsible for escorting them to a halfway house. When the nurse's corpse washes up on the beach at Marken, it becomes apparent that the institution holds the key to the investigation. And it seems that Vos's boss, De Groot, has something to hide which is relevant to the case.
Then, the case takes an unexpected turn when it becomes clear that someone is posing as Little Jo - Kim and Mia's other sister - who was supposedly murdered along with their parents ten years ago . . .
Sinterklaas, a beaming, friendly saint with a white beard, was set to mark his arrival in Amsterdam with a parade so celebrated it would be watched live on television throughout the Netherlands. Today the crowds would run into three hundred thousand or more, and the police presence would top four figures. The city centre was closed to all traffic as a golden barge bore Sinterklaas down the Amstel river, surrounded by a throng of private boats full of families trying to get close.
Amsterdam is bursting at the seams with children trying to get a glimpse of their hero and families enjoying the occasion. The police are out in force, struggling to manage the crowds on one of the busiest days of the year.
Brigadier Pieter Vos is on duty with his young assistant, Laura Bakker, when the first grenade hits. As Sinterklaas prepares to address the crowds, a terrorist incident grips the heart of the city. In the chaos a young girl wearing a pink jacket is kidnapped.
But the abducted child isn't the daughter of an Amsterdam aristocrat as the terrorists first thought. She's the daughter of an impoverished Georgian prostitute, friendless and trapped in the web of vice that is Amsterdam's Red Light District. As the security forces and the police clash over the ensuing investigation, the perpetrator's horrifying demands become clear.
Vos, trapped in a turf war with state intelligence, tries to unravel a conspiracy that reaches from the brothels of the city to the hierarchy of the security services. And at its heart lies an eight-year-old girl, snatched from a loving mother and then ferried from one criminal lair to the next. Her life in the balance as Vos and Laura Bakker struggle to uncover the shocking truth behind her abduction. What is the life of one immigrant child worth in the greater political game emerging around them?