The House of Dolls (Detective Pieter Vos)

Travel Guide

Well if it’s location you’re looking for then this book has got it in bucket loads as this is a great read to bring the city of Amsterdam to life – not just the streets but the ambience, the dark corners, the bridges over the fog covered canals..

Amsterdam hosts many shady characters in this book and the gangland and red light areas are also explored. Whilst they won’t be on any tourist map soon, they show the city in many mysterious and intriguing ways. wonder what Laura, the trainee detective who first tells Pieter of this latest disappearance makes of it really since she is considered somewhat of a country bumpkin having come from a remote place  – Friesland – in the north of the country.

The Rijksmuseum and the ‘house of dolls’

This has to be your first port of call for any booktrail. What could this small strange miniature house of dolls mean?

“The dolls’s house of Petronella Oortman was complex and a good head taller than Pieter Vos, An Amsterdam canal mansion in miniature.”

The daughter of Wim Prins, a leading city politician, has been kidnapped and  working from the city hall, his background may have something to do with it since he is working on a crackdown in the sex and drugs trade.

Meanwhile the policeman Vos lives on a canal boat in Jordaan and to walk along the Eland Canal and see the various boats on the water shows the heart of the city – the canals and the way people lived and still do. The bridges, the bicycles all add to the overall atmosphere and show the city’s beating pulse.

“The canal was watching him. Listening. Waiting”

Prinsengracht

The courthouse on the Prinsengracht takes up the next part of the story as we follow the trail of a local gang lord who is desperately trying to get out of prison. How his story connect to the others has as many twists and turns as an Amsterdam canal itself.

Amsterdam,a character in the book itself is a multilayered character – holy and religious sites sit beside more salubrious ones –

“The big bulk of the old church lay around the corner.  But this part of De Wallen was firmly in the grip of the red-light district”

And from the author’s website  – where he also has an interactive map – he recommends going to the Jordaan area for the De Eland inspiration for one of the key locations in the book . “You never know who might be at the bar…” he says.

Well that’s enough reason for us to take ‘the House of dolls as our guidebook!”

And if you find yourself in the Jordaan do pop into De Eland, the real-life inspiration for one of the key locations, as you’ll discover here. You never know who might be at the bar…