Inspector Van Der Valk

Alluring, unstable, and frantically self-absorbed, Elsa de Charmoy was a dangerous woman, and now she's a dead one, shot with a gun bought by her former lover. Sulking in an Amsterdam jail, he swears it's been years since he saw Elsa, but Inspector Van der Valk isn’t quite ready to be persuaded. Like Inspector Maigret (to whom he is often compared), Van der Valk tends to pick apart the details, ideally over a good meal. And while Van der Valk's ruminations may frustrate his more action-minded colleagues, they inevitably yield a surprising resolution.

Bloemendaal aan Zee, that smugly prosperous little seaside town, has more television sets per capita than anywhere else in Holland. Even its drunks are polite, its houses uniformly tidy and sparkling clean. But there's something very wrong with the kids. The most popular teenagers have formed a gang that is preying, with increasing viciousness, on nearby Amsterdam - Inspector Van der Valk's patch. Van der Valk has no love for chilly, yuppified Bloemendaal. But his curiosity is as voracious as his appetite for good food.

Police Inspector Piet Van der Valk becomes involved in an extraordinary case when he crosses the path of a pretty daughter of a famous dead conductor. This terse crime thriller follows Van der Valk on an exhilarating ride through the unknown. Born in London in 1927, Nicolas Freeling is the author of over 30 titles, many of which are part of the crime genre. His education was broad and he attended a series of schools in England, Ireland, and France. He served in the Royal Air Force, and from 1950 worked at various jobs in kitchens, hotels, and restaurants throughout Europe.

A disturbing, superb thriller from the pen of a master storyteller... A flurry of anonymous letters and two suicides leads Inspector Van der Valk to a mission in Drente where small-town hysteria may just lead to one of the century's most wanted criminals.

Van der Valk is on the case again as a mysterious letter is unearthed alluding to the murder of a man named Cabestan. In the letter, the murderer is named but van der Valk must find out first who this mysterious letter-writer is. What transpires is a tale of deception and adultery as the rich Carl Merckel, the managing director of the Lutz Brothers merchant bank, lays an accusation of cold blooded homicide of which, he claims, his wife had no part to play.

This was the end of the story that had started "Once upon a time, in a rainy country, there was a king...." The end had not happened in a rainy country, but on a bone-dry Spanish hillside, 300 metres from where Van der Valk had left a lot of blood, some splintered bone, a few fragments of gut, and a ten-seventy-five Mauser rifle bullet. No one had broken any laws. But a handsome, middle-aged millionaire had disappeared with a naked girl. And Van der Valk was given the job of finding out why.

Seventh in the Van der Valk series. How do you prove a murder that's almost impossible to prove was a murder? An elusive homicide evades even the most decisive guile from a true master of criminal investigation, but Van der Valk won't let that stop him. A seemingly unintended death of a local restaurant owner might not be as accidental as some would like it to appear, and when the suspicions of the Commissaire are aroused, Van der Valk is called in to ask some very awkward questions.

Arlette Van der Valk finds herself widowed from a man who left an indelible mark on the world of crime investigation. After her initial grief, Arlette is at a loose end - Piet was her life, but Van der Valk soon finds that making decisions help ease the pain. After remarrying, she sets up an advisory agency but things don't always run smoothly as this ingenious story shows. Not only dealing with her clients' problems, Arlette must also deal with threats to her life.

What's the connection between an elderly businessman who's been stabbed to death on the streets of Amsterdam and three lovely Dutch expatriates living as housewives in Dublin? That's the central question of The Lovely Ladies and it's one that extends into a fascinating mystery in the finest Freeling tradition. Intelligent and realistic mystery with well-written characters. The elderly man was killed in the market place in Amsterdam, just as Inspector Van der Valk was going past.

A Van der Valk Thriller - For Piet Van der Valk it was just another ordinary case. No crime had been committed. It was just a matter of following a lead on a wealthy Amsterdam jeweller. But two bullets put paid to Van der Valk's curiosity. For Piet Van der Valk, this ordinary case turns out to be his last.

Arlette Van der Valk finds herself widowed from a man who left an indelible mark on the world of crime investigation. After her initial grief, Arlette is at a loose end - Piet was her life, but Van der Valk soon finds that making decisions help ease the pain. After remarrying, she sets up an advisory agency but things don't always run smoothly as this ingenious story shows. Not only dealing with her clients' problems, Arlette must also deal with threats to her life.

Running a one-woman agency in Strasbourg, Arlette Van der Valk sets out to uncover an illegal fur-trader’s activities and ends up in the Argentine searching for a runaway. What ensues is a chilling warning from a mysterious voice on the telephone. It seems that one of her murdered husband’s rivals has finally caught up with her. Life for Arlette is just one damn thing after another.

Crime and corruption ooze from the dark corners of small towns and no one understands this more than Police Inspector van der Valk. But provincial town life isn’t Jan Rijk, a right-wing criminal whose connections with the underworld may be devastating to the lives of small-town people. What can van der Valk do to stop him?