Rating: 4/5
Review: A decent mystery but with flaws
I quite enjoyed this unusual mystery/thriller, but I did have my reservations about it. Set in Amsterdam, the protagonist is Pieter Posthumus, a civil servant whose job is to locate the families of those who die alone or unidentified, and to give the unclaimed dead a dignified funeral. Naturally, he is humane, empathetic and exceptionally diligent, and this leads him to conduct what are effectively criminal investigations on his own. Here he is looking into the death of two men in whom the police are not interested, but whose deaths turn out to be related to each other and to possible terrorist activity which is being investigated by the security services.
The plot development is slow and largely action-free, with plenty of character development and local atmosphere. I often like this very much, but it did feel a little turgid in this book, with the sense that the authors were trying just a bit too hard to paint a colourful picture and not really getting on with the story. There is some fairly convincing background about Muslim attitudes and the attitudes of others to them, but I found a lot of the plot and some characters pretty unconvincing. Posthumus's persistent refusal to go to the police is plain silly, for example, and I found him just a little too saintly in his unfailing humanity and integrity to be wholly convincing. Similarly the unscrupulous security service boss and his behaviour seemed thoroughly implausible, and there were coincidences and unlikely happenings which made it all seem a little thin to me.
The prose is decent enough in translation and there's nothing really wrong with the book, but it didn't quite do it for me, somehow. My rating is rounded up from 3.5 stars because only 3 stars seems churlish for a decently written book, but I'm not sure I'll be bothering with the rest of the (inevitable) trilogy.
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