Janwillem van de Wetering Books

What appears to be the welcome murder of a local, much-disliked pimp turns out to be much larger than that single crime as the Dutch authorities struggle to get to the bottom of the shocking truth. Reprint."

Suspecting a missing woman's husband of murder, two Amsterdam detectives try to locate the missing body of Mrs. Fortune, while at the same time trying to find the killer of an unidentified male stuffed in the trunk of a stolen Mercedes.

A young American woman is found stabbed in a temple. A boy who sells noodle soup is accused of drug dealing. An old man who never drinks becomes so drunk he dies in his burning house. These cases are handed to Inspector Saito Masanobu, renowned as the most clever detective on the Kyoto police force. But no one can guess the secret of his success: Parallel Cases Under the Pear Tree, an ancient book devised by Chinese magistrates a thousand years ago. With it, Saito can solve the most baffling cases. For even in the holy city, death and danger lurk around every corner....

On a quiet street in downtown Amsterdam, the founder of a new religious society/commune—a group that calls itself “Hindist” and mixes elements of various “Eastern” traditions—is found hanging from a ceiling beam. Detective-Adjutant Gripstra and Sergeant de Gier of the Amsterdam police are sent to investigate what looks like a simple suicide, but they are immediately suspicious of the circumstances.  This now-classic novel, first published in 1975, introduces Janwillem van de Wetering’s lovable Amsterdam cop duo of portly, worldly-wise Gripstra and handsome, contemplative de Gier. With its unvarnished depiction of the legacy of Dutch colonialism and the darker facets of Amsterdam’s free drug culture, this excellent procedural asks the question of whether a murder may ever be justly committed.

The philosophical Detective Adjutant Grijpstra and his assistant, Sergeant de Gier, appear in eight of these superb mystery stories. In one they learn which of two lady friends put a bullet through the head of a handsome oceanographer found dead amidst his tanks of shiny, living mussels. In another they strong-arm a brutal crime-lord whose henchman threatens the sergeant's cat. Another finds them wondering how a man could explode a wife-killing bomb in the country while he was, all the time, in his city office. Still another leads them to a murderer whose weapon is a chocolate Easter bunny. And that's just the beginning: the collection contains six other stories, each touched with that curious blend of wit and the macabre which readers have come to expect from the pen of Janwillem van de Wetering.

Seen by many as a contemporary classic, Janwillem van de Wetering's small and admirable memoir records the experiences of a young Dutch student—later a widely celebrated mystery writer—who spent a year and a half as a novice monk in a Japanese Zen Buddhist monastery. As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, author of Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, has written, The Empty Mirror "should be very encouraging for other Western seekers." It is the first book in a trilogy that continues with A Glimpse of Nothingness and Afterzen.

Douwe Scherjoen was a well-to-do livestock dealer from the remote Dutch province of Friesland. Then his corpse was found, half-charred by flames, floating in a dory in Amsterdam's harbor. No one knows why he was in the nation's capital, far from the bucolic pleasures of his native village of Dingjum. But since Grijpstra is Frisian by birth and can understand the language, he and his partner de Gier are dispatched to find the killer — or at least uncover the motive for the crime. And they discover that while no one, not even his wife, liked the victim, the culprit is the unlikeliest suspect of all.

Amsterdam detectives De Gier and Grijpstra, investigating an apparently unmotivated murder, come to slippery grips with a stealthy hijacker and a sinister Arab crime-syndicate head

What appears to be the welcome murder of a local, much-disliked pimp turns out to be much larger than that single crime as the Dutch authorities struggle to get to the bottom of the shocking truth.

Detectives Grijpstra and de Gier uncover evidence of sorcery as they investigate the murder of a high-class prostitute who lived in a canal houseboat