Hard Rain

During a random break-in, three heroin addicts discover the corpse of banker Martin Ijsbreker. They arrange his death to look like a suicide and flee with his valuables, but are found dead of an overdose the next day. The investigating officer dismissed their deaths as an accident, but the commissaris suspects that his cousin and childhood nemesis, Willem Fernandus, murdered Ijsbreker to protect his own shares in the dead man’s bank. When the two finally confront each other as adversaries, someone will die.Praise for Hard Rain

"Good thrillers are necessarily about good versus evil, but hardly any thrillers try to explore the philosophical nature of either one . . . A couple of attending virtues make Janwillem van de Wetering's new novel more than a routine case of venality and violence. One is a world-weary humor . . . the other is an exploration of a good guy's ethic and a bad guy's ethos."
—Los Angeles Times

"One of the more fetching outings for van de Wetering's offbeat Amsterdam cops—offering a leisurely, whimsical mixture of resourceful action, psychological confrontation, and philosophical repartee . . . An engaging excursion, dark-edged yet oddly lighthearted."
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

"A fast-moving story that combines action, detection, satire, Zen philosophy and pure fun, and shows van de Wetering to be at the top of his form."
—Publishers Weekly Janwillem van de Wetering (1931–2008) was born and raised in Rotterdam, but lived most recently in Surry, Maine. He served as a member of the Amsterdam Special Constabulary and was once a Zen Buddhist monk. He is renowned for his detective fiction, including Outsider in Amsterdam; The Corpse on the Dike; the short story collection The Sergeant’s Cat; The Maine Massacre, which garnered him the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière; and ten other books in the Amsterdam Cops series.