A police novel that meets all the criteria. Characters, dialogues, plot, structure, twists, action, credibility. Four young people are murdered in quick succession. One of them is Arno Linter. At first there is no connection between the four murders, but the murder team of the Antwerp commissioner Liese Meerhout struggles until they have found largely satisfactory answers, as in the seventeen ‘Meerhouts’ before.
This is not an easy task, with the personal problems that are becoming more and more intense. Lieses demented mother, partner Matthias who wants to start her own restaurant, Detective Laurent’s growing lack of enthusiasm, not to mention the fear of aging in Liese’s right-hand man Masson. She also has problems – yes, it’s a cliché in this genre, but it doesn’t bother at all here – with her superiors; at one point she even gets ‘blamed’ – that’s Flemish for a negative note in her file.
Coppers writes police novels in a rich Flemish tradition, which was once fertilized by the first winner (1986) of the Gouden Strop, Jef Geeraerts. The colorful Belgian, now not entirely uncontroversial because of his Congo books, is dead, Coppers is alive. And writes!
Rolf Bos – Journalist and freelance reviewer
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