The Wrong Girl (Detective Pieter Vos) by David Hewson
| The Wrong Girl (Detective Pieter Vos) by David Hewson | |
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| Category: Crime | |
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Reviewer: Sue Magee
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| Summary: When grenades land in the pre-Christmas crowds in Amsterdam Brigadier Pieter Vos and Laura Bakker struggle to control the situation and in the melee a young girl wearing a pink jacket is kidnapped. She's the child of an immigrant who happens to be a prostitute: will the life of that child have value in a tense political situation? | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 400/13h6m | Date: May 2015 |
| Publisher: Macmillan | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1447246183 | |
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Sinterklaas was arriving in the Netherlands and there were massive crowds out in the central squares to greet him: it was a carnival and some three hundred thousand people were there - adults and children. One well-to-do child, wearing a bright pink jacket was snatched by a Black Pete - one of Sinterklass’s helpers who were giving sweets to the crowds - but when a grenade exploded the girl seemed to escape her captor. But the pink jacket was spotted and the girl wearing was grabbed - only this wasn’t the same girl. The first girl who was going to be held to ransom was from one of Amsterdam’s oldest families and there’s money there. The second girl - the ‘’wrong girl’’ of the title was the daughter of an immigrant who was working as a prostitute in the red light area to make money to support them both.
Brigadier Pieter Vos and his young assistant Laura Bakker were in the crowds and initially it was thought that the girl had simply become separated from her mother: before long the terrifying demands of the terrorist became clear and Pieter Vos found himself caught up in a turf war with the security services. Is the life of one eight-year old child, the daughter of an immigrant prostitute, worth anything when so much is at stake? But everyone underestimates that eight-year-old child, Natalya and her mother, Hanna.
I had it worked out quite quickly: I knew what had happened and why. And do you know what? I was right! Only what I thought would be the end of the story was actually only a fraction of the tale. This story is far cleverer than I had initially thought. It’s also a deeply uneasy story and it’s very difficult to see that there might be a reasonable outcome. It’s not a book to start if you’re going to have to put it down: you might ‘’want’’ to because of the nature of the story, but you’re not going to be able to. But you will need to have your wits about you with this book: there are a lot of characters and sometimes I found it difficult to keep track of who was who. Even Pieter Vos doesn’t play a particularly big part in the story and occasionally I found myself without an anchor.
Rather than reading the book I listened to an audio download (which I bought myself) and which was narrated by Saul Reichlin. In fact I was tempted to buy the download ‘’because’’ of the narrator and I wasn’t disappointed - he narrated an earlier book in this series and I enjoyed his work on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. He doesn’t disappoint and I suspect that I would have found the story much harder to follow had it not been for his professionalism.
We’ve also been impressed by another story about the plight of women trafficked into Amsterdam to work in the sex trade.
David Hewson's Detective Pieter Voss Novels in Chronological Order
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You can read more book reviews or buy The Wrong Girl (Detective Pieter Vos) by David Hewson at Amazon.com.
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