The first half of the story has been released as a stand alone story for celebrating the annual Dutch Book week, and was a present for those readers who spend an x-amount on books. And as such was my first time reading JW van de Wetering.This story starts with the policemen Karate (nickname because of certain skills) & Ketchup (he did not mind his suspects bloodied) having thrown a poor man into the canal because he was misbehaving. And it proved to be quite a job to recover the man from the canal with a growing crowd cheering on the mad civilian having a water fight with a policeman. It needs the Gier and a busload of reinforcements to calm down the crowd and retrieving the man from the canal. In the mean time Grijpstra hears the story concerning the unhappy swimmer which boils down to his wife leaving him and leaving him with an empty apartment. And nobody knows where the good lady went or how she went. It takes half a copper of the size of Grijpstra to smell something crooked. And guess what even the commissaris, who never works on Saturday or if you believe the newspaper works ever at all or is in possession of even a brain also according the same paper, thinks that Grijpstra has a point. So G & G start their rechercher, which is French for detecting. A murder without a body to begin with.And when the story ends de Gier is still not smoking because habits can be broken or so he claims and Grijpstra has a whole different theory, which started the story to begin with.In the second part of the book they find a dead body in a stolen Mercedes and Grijpstra is convinced that there is no murder involved and that it is all a cosmic accident And de Gier is pleased that Cardozo has the flue as a beautiful policewoman will take his place and help them detecting. Grijpstra now worries about his partner when it comes to this particular member of the female species.The dead German turns out to have died of an ulcer, which leaves the question how the man ended up in the trunk of a stolen car.Both stories belong together as the various characters do play their parts, there is crime, punishment & cigarettes in the end.
Well, I'll start off by stating that this was my least favourite book in the Grijpstra & de Gier series so far. I'm not sure what was going on in Janwillem van de Wetering's life at the time he wrote this, but it seems like there may have been some hallucinogens involved.The first part of this book is rather trippy. The second part is a little better but still unusual. Plus, the names of the characters in this book are unlike any in the other van de Wetering books I have read so far and they were odd, to say the least.The story was just OK, not great. Still entertaining, but lacked something. I am still planning on reading all of the books in the Grijpstra & de Gier series, so time to start tracking down The Streetbird.
