The Hollow-Eyed Angel

July 1, 2003
The author's 13th mystery involving the Amsterdam cops (Angels), plus two previously out-of-print titles in his darkly humorous series.

July 1, 1996
The 13th adventure for the Amsterdam cops (after Just a Corpse at Twilight) leaves Grijpstra at home and follows the ailing commissaris (the head of the force) and de Gier to Manhattan on the meandering trail of a Dutch national's death in Central Park. In Amsterdam, Johan Termeer, a hairdresser and civilian member of the auxiliary police, asks the commissaris to prod the NYPD investigation into the death of his uncle, Bert Termeer, who had operated a mail-order book business in New York. The elderly man's body had been found under some bushes in the park; an autopsy determined death by heart attack, and the police were suggesting that his body had been mutilated after death by raccoons. The elderly commissaris, troubled by a recurrent nightmare about a beautiful blonde bus driver with empty eyes, flies to New York for a police conference and checks in with his American colleagues. His messages home are confused enough to warrant de Gier's joining him, while Grijpstra does background checks in Amsterdam. De Gier has an encounter with a mounted policewoman; he and his elderly superior are puzzled by Bert's housemate in a Tribeca warehouse. Very little turns out as expected--not the cause of death of a high-living homosexual golfer in the Netherlands, nor the death (or the life) of Bert Termeer--in this leisurely tale whose shape declares itself as randomly as a waterstain on a ceiling--or the events of real lives.