Deel 2 van de serie over Pieter Posthumus. Aardig en een beetje ingewikkeld gemaakt. ( )

"Britta Bolt" is the not-so-secret joint identity under which two Amsterdam-based expats, the German-born criminal lawyer Britta Böhler and the South African writer Rodney Bolt, publish crime stories together. Their books appear more or less at the same time in Dutch, German and English, so it's not easy to tell which language they start off in: possibly all three.

This is the second novel in a series featuring Pieter Posthumus, an Amsterdam city official whose job it is to arrange funerals for those who die in the city without any friends and relatives on hand to make such arrangements for them. Needless to say, he occasionally succumbs to the temptation to go beyond his job description and find out for himself how his clients came to die.

This time, however, a murder takes place under his nose, in the house next-door to the old-fashioned café kept by Pieter's friend Anna, on the edge of the Wallen. The victim is a promising young artist, a former rent-boy rescued off the streets by his eccentric landlady Marloes, and when the police decide to arrest Marloes for the murder it's Pieter and Anna who step in to try to establish her innocence.

It's an agreeably complex tale with a plot that revolves largely around the social changes going on in Amsterdam's famous red light area, with organised crime edging out the small local businesses that have been there for generations, and the City trying to clean the area up and gentrify it. Maybe not quite top-flight crime fiction, and a bit rough around the edges here and there (they should explain the difference between interment and internment to their spelling-checker some time...) but there's enough plot and local colour around to keep the reader amused for a few hours. ( )