The Utrecht Murders by Jonathan Wilkins
UTRECHT SNOW:
Utrecht police inspector Caes Heda leads a team looking into the disappearance of young women. Meanwhile his daughter, Truus, bored with University takes up a job with disgraced former police office Thijs Orman at his Private Detective Agency and finds herself looking for yet another missing girl, this time it's her bosses own daughter. are they all linked? At the Kroonstraat Police station the team Caes has put together look into the normal run of the mill cases and try to overcome the weather as much as the crime in the city as snow envelopes the streets of Utrecht. We meet twins Freddie and Maaike Meijer who patrol the streets together with colleagues Adrie and Danny. The team is made up by Madelon Verloet and man mountain Ernst Hougewood. Together they investigate car theft, street crime, assault and finally murder. We look at the everyday lives of the police involved, Caes still traumatised after his wifes early death and Truus falling for Maaike.
UTRECHT RAIN:
Maaike Meijer is attacked in a senseless outbreak of violence at the Dom Tower in Utrecht. Her brother, Freddie, fights off the assailants, but how is the brutality linked to a series of violent threats, cyber crime and the Dutch Secret Service? Truus Heda continues her work as a private investigator whilst caring for her lover before finding the missing link. As the nightmare unfolds we enter the world of Serbian gangsters and Utrecht Goths and see how Hoofdinspecteur Caes Heda and his overworked team tackle a crime that could consume the city.
Author Bio
Jonathan loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. Hetaught PE and English for 20 years and coached women’s basketball for over 30 years.
He regularly teaches creative writing workshops in and around Leicester.
Social Media:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WriterJWilkins
Website: www.jonathanwilkins.co.uk
Review
I love reading books which are set in different cultures and I don’t remember seeing any crime fiction that is set in Utrecht before. So I was excited to give them a bash.
I really enjoyed the characters in this series but especially those of Truus and Maaike. They seemed the most rounded characters to me. Yes, I also like Caes but I loved the girls being together.
The only thing that I didn’t like too much as a reader was the amount of Dutch wording. Some of it I was able to recognise as I did German at school and they do resemble one another but I can imagine that some readers would have been put off by this.
I definitely thought that book two was the more accomplished in the series. It just had the feeling of being more rounded and well balanced than the first book. But then who doesn’t get better the more they write?!
This is an interesting start to a series and I would definitely want to read more about our merry band of investigators.
