BOOK ONE
Anneliese Vos, sixteen-year-old daughter of Amsterdam detective, Pieter Vos, disappeared three years ago in mysterious circumstances. Her distraught father’s desperate search reveals nothing and results in his departure from the police force.
Pieter now lives in a broken down houseboat in the colourful Amsterdam neighbourhood of the Jordaan. One day, while Vos is wasting time at the Rijksmuseum staring at a doll’s house that seems to be connected in some way to the case, Laura Bakker, a misfit trainee detective from the provinces, visits him. She’s come to tell him that Katja Prins, daughter of an important local politician, has gone missing in circumstances similar to Anneliese.
In the company of the intriguing and awkward Bakker, Vos finds himself drawn back into the life of a detective. A life which he thought he had left behind. Hoping against hope that somewhere will lay a clue to the fate of Anneliese, the daughter he blames himself for losing . . .
BOOK TWO
Sinterklaas, a beaming, friendly saint with a white beard, was set to mark his arrival in Amsterdam with a parade so celebrated it would be watched live on television throughout the Netherlands. Today the crowds would run into three hundred thousand or more, and the police presence would top four figures.
Amsterdam is bursting at the seams with children trying to get a glimpse of their hero and families enjoying the occasion. The police are out in force, struggling to manage the crowds on one of the busiest days of the year. Brigadier Pieter Vos is on duty with his young assistant, Laura Bakker, when the first grenade hits. As Sinterklaas prepares to address the crowds, a terrorist incident grips the heart of the city. In the chaos a young girl wearing a pink jacket is kidnapped. But the abducted child isn’t the daughter of an Amsterdam aristocrat as the terrorists first thought. She’s the daughter of an impoverished Georgian prostitute, friendless and trapped in the web of vice that is Amsterdam’s Red Light District.
BOOK THREE
The Timmers sisters, Kim and Mia, were just eleven years old when they were accused of murdering the lead singer of a world-famous pop band in the Dutch fishing village of Volendam. They believed he was responsible for the death of their family, including their sister known as Little Jo.
Ten years have passed and it’s now time for their release from Marken, the local psychiatric institution. Pieter Vos, a detective with the Amsterdam police, is given cause to reopen the case when the girls disappear along with the nurse responsible for escorting them to a halfway house. The investigation uncovers a shocking cover-up which leaves one of Vos’s closest colleagues under scrutiny
BOOK FOUR
Anne Schrijver is just twenty-two years old. She works in the picturesque Albert Cuyp market where her father has a flower stall. Brimming with personality, she’s always been popular with customers. But then she goes missing, only to be found barely alive tied to a stone angel in a graveyard, surrounded by a ring of fire. Her body contains traces of a drug which connects police to a previous case: the Sleeping Beauty murders.
But Annie seems to have been the lucky one, as a body is found nearby, freshly tattooed with three words: Sleep Baby Sleep.