View source for Sleep Baby Sleep (Detective Pieter Voss) by David Hewson

{{infobox1
|title=Sleep Baby Sleep (Detective Pieter Voss)
|author=David Hewson
|reviewer=Sue Magee
|genre=Crime
|summary=The fourth book in the Detective Pieter Voss series is a cracker.  It took me a while to be pulled in but when I was I couldn't put the book down. Highly recommended.
|rating=4.5
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|pages=352
|publisher=Macmillan
|date=June 2017
|isbn=978-1447293439
|website=https://davidhewson.com/
|cover=1447293436
|aznuk=1447293436
|aznus=1447293436
}}

Annie Schrijver is just twenty-two-years old and is known as 'the flower girl' in the picturesque Albert Cuyp flower market, where she works on her father's stall.  It's almost impossible to believe that she's missing as she's very personable and always popular with the customers.  When she's found she's barely alive though, tied to a stone angel in a graveyard and surrounded by a ring of fire.  In her body there are traces of a drug which takes Detective Pieter Voss back four years to the Sleeping Beauty murders.  He had his doubts at the time as to whether or not everyone involved had been caught: now it seems that his doubts have come back to haunt him.

Not everyone is as lucky as Annie Schrijver: there's another body lying across a nearby grave and the man has just been tattooed with the words ''Sleep Baby Sleep''.  Voss knows that he's being played: someone is texting him and leaving him notes to tell him that he's missing something.  The ultimate indignity is when his dog, Sam, is stolen from him in a bar and used to lure him to the graveyard where Annie and the man's body have been left.  If a murderer is taunting him, then he's got work problems too: there's a new station commissaris recently transferred in from national headquarters at Zoetermeer.  Jillian Chandra isn't going to stand any nonsense and she sees Voss as a loose canon.  So far as she's concerned the sooner he's out of the way the better.  Traffic's been mentioned - if he has to stay in the force at all.

Some stories pull you in slowly: in the early pages I'll confess to being more worried about Sam than I was about any of the human victims, alive or dead, but gradually the people got under my skin.  Voss is damaged but doing his best to do his job despite all the obstacles which Chandra tries to put in his way.  There are moments of complete farce/black humour which I'll confess had me laughing out loud.  Hewson steers a very narrow course well - it would have been so easy to make the dreadful Chandra a caricature. 

The plot is excellent, particularly the twist at the end which I didn't so much not see coming, as never considered that it could have been there.  It's so good that it won't be long before I go back and reread the book - this time I want to see how Hewson did it.  Normally I recommend that a police procedural is worth buying rather than borrowing on the basis that in years to come you'll approach it with fresh eyes and a reduced memory; ''Sleep Baby Sleep'' is one of the rare examples where you'll want to reread as soon as possible simply for the pleasure of counting the number of times you say ''of course!''

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.

It's a different continent, but if ''Sleep Baby Sleep'' appeals to you then I think you'll also enjoy [[The Last Train (Detective Hiroshi) by Michael Pronko]].

[[David Hewson's Detective Pieter Voss Novels in Chronological Order]]

{{amazontext|amazon=1447293436}}
{{amazonUStext|amazon=1447293436}}

{{commenthead}}