Harbour Master (2016) by Daniel Pembrey
GoodReads meta-data is 386 pages rated 3.48 by 1084 litizens.
Genre: krimi, thriller
Verdict: by the numbers.
A floater in Amsterdam harbour kicks off the book and there is much about the harbour which adds local colour, residential houseboats on canals, Eurocrats, and the Red Light District are all present and ticked off the list. About halfway through the book this victim is all but forgotten and I never did figure out what she had to do with the plot. But then neither did our hero.
Yes, I am afraid I found it all pretty mechanical from the Handbook of How to Write an International Thriller. The publisher strives so hard for this market that the promotional material refers to Scandinavia fiction. Get a map, Dude! The Netherlands is not now nor has it ever been in Scandinavia. While astride the high horse of pedantry, I also wondered about the protagonist’s penchant for referring to the country as Holland. Would a Dutch public servant do that?
Nearing retirement inspector Henk van der Pol cannot resist a little payback for some officers who have made his life a misery of late. Well that seems to this reader a better summary than the official one which sees Henk as a paladin, the one just man, among all the corruption. His Christ complex put me in mind of the last episodes of Foyle’s War when the protagonist carried the cross ever so manfully. Henricus combines self-righteousness with a victim complex.
The plot, as thriller plots evidently must be, is far-fetched and global from Ghana and back.
There are some very nice parts but they are buried in the breathless complexity of implicating everyone else in evil. Here’s an instance: When van der Pol realises one of the alleged victims simply could not have been assaulted in the locale reported, and that particular alleged victim’s plan to pay himself was ingenious to say the least, but all that seems attenuated and anti-climatic by the time we wade through Ukrainian gun slingers, Secret Service thugs, Belgium swat teams, and …. Oh, I almost forgot to mention the vigilante murder of one villain. Well, you get the picture.
It is volume one is a series. All yours!