‘A novel brilliantly evoking the isolation of a woman with an unbearable weight on her conscience’

SUNDAY TIMES

‘Succeeds as a portrait of both a city and, in its heroine, a delightfully dysfunctional personality’

SUNDAY EXPRESS

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When Lotte Meerman is faced with the choice of interviewing the latest victim in a string of assaults or talking to a man who claims he really isn’t dead, she picks the interview. After all, the man cannot possibly be who he claims he is: Andre Nieuwkamp was murdered as a teenager over thirty years ago, and it had been a police success story nationwide when the skeletal remains found in the dunes outside Amsterdam had been identified, and the murderer subsequently arrested.

Yet concerned about this encounter, Lotte goes to the Hotel Mondrian the next day to talk to the man, but what she finds is his corpse. And his passport shows that he wasn’t Andre Nieuwkamp as he said, but Theo Brand, a British citizen.

Subsequent DNA tests reveal that the man was Andre Nieuwkamp so now Lotte has a double mystery on her hands and needs to figure out not only why Andre waited so long to tell anyone he was still alive, but also who was the teenager murdered in the dunes all those decades ago.

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Praise for Anja de Jager

‘An impressive debut … De Jager is as good on dodgy family relations as she is on police procedure’

The Times

‘Detective Lotte Meerman is damaged by her past and tortured by the dreadful mistake she’s made at work … Amsterdam in the vicious grip of a bitter winter is the other star here, beautiful and deadly’ Cath Staincliffe

‘A tightly written, cleverly plotted whodunit that keeps the reader guessing almost to the last page’ Irish Examiner’

‘de Jager manages to circumvent the overfamiliar. The evocation of a bitterly cold Amsterdam is worthy of Nicholas Freeling’s Van der Valk books’ The Independent