This is the eighth of the van der Valk novels. It's the late 1960s, and a housewife has been gunned down in her provincial Dutch apartment in what looks oddly like a military-style assassination. The trail seems to lead to her past as a nurse in Vietnam at the time of Dien Bien Phu, and van der Valk finds himself trying to pick his way through the French military bureaucracy without stepping on too many toes made sensitive by the political fallout from that disaster and more recently from Algeria. As you would expect there is a lot of food-talk, some gentle mocking of French peculiarities as seen by a Dutch (i.e. British) outsider, a stack of opera references, and quite a lot of self-deprecating jokes about the conventions of spy fiction.

Fun to spot some of the very 60s things going on — Dutch people coming home for lunch and eating a cooked meal in the middle of the day; everyone smoking; van der Valk buying himself a Playboy to read at the airport; water-filled sofas made of transparent plastic; telephones disguised as ornaments. What a long time ago it all was! ( )