The Perfidious Parrot - Hardcover

Janwillem Van De Wetering

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569471029 ISBN 13: 9781569471029

Publisher: Soho Press, 1997

Synopsis

Janwillem van de Wetering's fourteenth Amsterdam Cops novel finds Grijpstra, de Gier, and the commissaris blackmailed into investigating the mysterious hijacking of a supertanker's entire cargo. The adventure takes them to Key West and to the former Dutch colonies of Aruba and St. Eustatius in search of the missing oil and the villains who have killed more than once to protect their loot.

About this title

Review:

In a shabby bar on Aruba, a retired Dutch police commissioner eats stewed pears, talks about Gabriel García Márquez with a cab driver and a prostitute, and listens to a four-man percussion band play what he recognizes as "a Bach cantata he had once heard in Vienna." This can only be Janwillem van de Wetering territory--that slightly surreal world stretching from Amsterdam to Maine that has grown to include Key West, Florida, and various portions of the Caribbean. Ex-Amsterdam cops Grijpstra and de Gier have now gone private, seeking to avoid work while their former commissioner manages the huge cache of drug money they stumbled on and appropriated. Threats and cajolery send them reluctantly off to search for the thieves who siphoned a cargo of oil bound for Cuba from a tanker owned by a fascinatingly obnoxious father-and-son team out of Rotterdam. The titular parrot, by the way, is a bar in Key West, where lap dancing and information are served up along with the multicolored drinks. Soho Press has also published quality paperback editions of two earlier van de Wetering books: Hard Rain and The Rattle-Rat.

About the Author:

Janwillem van de Wetering (1931–2008) was born and raised in Rotterdam, but lived most recently in Surry, Maine. He served as a member of the Amsterdam Special Constabulary and was once a Zen Buddhist monk. He is renowned for his detective fiction, including Outsider in Amsterdam, The Corpse on the Dike, The Japanese Corpse, and eleven other books in the Grijpstra and de Gier series.

About this edition

• Publisher: Soho Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1569471029
• ISBN 13: 9781569471029
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280