Crime mystery set mainly in OXFORD in WW2
Ten Great Crime Thrillers set in AMSTERDAM
11th April 2025
Ten great crime thrillers set in Amsterdam. In fiction at least there is a darker side to Amsterdam to that normally seen by visitors. The city’s intricate canal system, a hallmark of its identity, often becomes a silent witness to sinister events, with bodies found floating or secrets hidden beneath the murky waters. The narrow, gabled houses lining these waterways, steeped in history, can conceal dark histories and clandestine activities.
Authors frequently utilise Amsterdam’s iconic locations to add a layer of authenticity and intrigue. The contrast between the city’s open, tolerant image and the hidden criminal underbelly is a recurring theme, creating a compelling duality. The blend of old-world charm and modern vices makes Amsterdam a rich and multifaceted setting for crime fiction.
Here are ten of our favourite crime thrillers set in the city.
After the Silence by Jake Woodhouse
A body is found hanging on a hook above the canals of Amsterdam’s old town, a mobile phone forced into the victim’s mouth.
In a remote coastal village, a doll lies in the ashes of a burnt-down house. But the couple who died in the fire had no children of their own. Did a little girl escape the blaze? And, if so, who is she and where is she now?
Inspector Jaap Rykel knows that he’s hunting a clever and brutal murderer. Still grieving from the violent death of his last partner, Rykel must work alongside a junior out-of-town detective with her own demons to face, if he has any hope of stopping the killer from striking again.
Their investigation reveals two dark truths: everybody in this city harbours secrets – and hearing those secrets comes at a terrible price …
After the Silence introduces Inspector Jaap Rykel in a gripping debut police procedural from Jake Woodhouse, which is sure to appeal to fans of Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson and Stuart MacBride. This is the first novel in The Amsterdam Quartet series.
Dirty Pictures by Patricia Ketola
When New York art dealer Elizabeth Martel’s mother falls ill, she returns to her hometown in the Midwest. After her mother’s death she is seriously short of funds, and a friend suggests she take a job as art adviser to billionaire grain merchant, Preston Greylander.
When Greylander is killed in a mysterious murder-suicide, Martel is left in possession of a Rembrandt that needs restoration. She takes the painting to Amsterdam where she deposits it with the prestigious firm of Van der Saar Fine Arts.
The Van der Saar family has been in the art business since the seventeenth century and the current generation is represented by two brothers: Hendrik, suave and charismatic, is the perfect front man, while the deceptively low-key Willem is a master of restoration. Hendrik and Martel enthusiastically resume an old love affair, and she discovers that the brothers’ personal lives are in chaos, and the family is haunted by guilt and swathed in deception.
As doubts arise about the authenticity of the Rembrandt, other actors arrive in Amsterdam determined to recover the picture.
Dirty Pictures is narrated by a woman with a brash, irreverent point of view. Martel’s voice is caustic, satirical, and darkly humorous. It gets into the readers head and stays there.
Patricia Ketola borrows freely from the genres of the crime novel, the family saga and the love story and combines them into a unique vision of life in a world heading for disaster. This richly textured novel celebrates the profound, the beautiful, and the good, and there is a lot of deep knowledge backing up Martel’s often outrageous statements.
A Cold Death in Amsterdam by Anja de Jager
Set in Amsterdam, the novel introduces Lotte Meerman, a Cold Case detective still recovering from the emotional devastation of her previous investigation. A tip-off leads Lotte to an unresolved ten-year-old murder case in which her father was the lead detective. When she discovers irregularities surrounding the original investigation that make him a suspect, she decides to cover for him. She doesn’t tell her boss about the family connection and jeopardises her career by hiding evidence. Now she has to find the real murderer before her acts are discovered, otherwise her father will go to jail and she will lose her job, the one thing in life she still takes pride in . . .
Initiation: Amsterdam, ’83 by Daniel Pembrey
In autumn 1983, Henk van der Pol is twenty-three years old and just one week out of police training. His dream is to be admitted to the elite detective bureau of Amsterdam’s police force, but he knows he needs to prove himself as a uniformed officer first.
That is, until he is sent to interview witnesses of an audacious kidnapping in the city centre: Alfred Heineken, head of the brewery corporation, has been snatched by shadowy assailants and driven at speed from the scene. Is this really just about a ransom or is there any truth to the rumour that West German terrorists are involved? The case is far beyond van der Pol’s rank but his instincts tell him to do everything in his modest power to solve it—even if it means putting his own life at risk.
From the bestselling author of The Harbour Master, Initiation introduces Daniel Pembrey’s beloved detective as a green young officer at the very start of his career, determined to outwit criminals and his superiors alike, in a first case that could well have been his last.
The Lover’s Portrait by Jennifer S Alderson
When a homosexual Dutch art dealer hides the stock from his gallery – rather than turn it over to his Nazi blackmailer – he pays with his life, leaving a treasure trove of modern masterpieces buried somewhere in Amsterdam, presumably lost forever. That is, until American art history student Zelda Richardson sticks her nose in.
After studying for a year in the Netherlands, Zelda scores an internship at the prestigious Amsterdam Museum, where she works on an exhibition of paintings and sculptures once stolen by the Nazis, lying unclaimed in Dutch museum depots almost seventy years later. When two women claim the same portrait of a young girl entitled Irises, Zelda is tasked with investigating the painting’s history and soon finds evidence that one of the two women must be lying about her past. Before she can figure out which one it is and why, Zelda learns about the Dutch art dealer’s concealed collection. And that Irises is the key to finding it all.
Her discoveries make her a target of someone willing to steal – and even kill – to find the missing paintings. As the list of suspects grows, Zelda realizes she has to track down the lost collection and unmask a killer if she wants to survive.
The House of Dolls by David Hewson
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 . . .
Lonely Graves by Britta Bolt
A suicide. A drowned man. A sudden death. It’s all in a day’s work for Pieter Posthumus.
In Amsterdam, the Lonely Funerals team exists to make sure that no one goes to the grave unmourned.
Posthumus takes that responsibility seriously.
A careful, humane man, he works hard to find out all he can about the anonymous or abandoned dead entrusted to his care.
So when a young Moroccan immigrant is found in the Prinsengracht canal in suspicious circumstances, Posthumus cannot let it go.
The police may call it accident or suicide; he is sure there’s more to it.
He takes up the case and starts digging… an investigation that leads to him getting caught up in a terror plot and in the way of an elite police unit.
Discover an Amsterdam beyond the charms and the canals, where Pieter Posthumus aims to find justice for all – both the living and the dead.
The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die by Marnie Riches
HE’S WATCHING HER. SHE DOESN’T KNOW IT…YET
When a bomb explodes at the University of Amsterdam, aspiring criminologist Georgina McKenzie is asked by the police to help flush out the killer.
But the bomb is part of a much bigger, more sinister plot that will have the entire city quaking in fear.
And the killer has a very special part for George to play…
A thrilling race against time with a heroine you’ll be rooting for, this book will keep you up all night!
Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma
It was the emblematic crime of our moment: On a cold November day in Amsterdam, an angry young Muslim man, Mohammed Bouyeri, the son of Moroccan immigrants, shot and killed the celebrated and controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, great-grandnephew of Vincent and iconic European provocateur, for making a movie with the vocally anti-Islam Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali that “blasphemed” Islam. After Bouyeri shot van Gogh, he calmly stood over the body and cut his throat with a curved machete, as if performing a ritual sacrifice, which in a very real sense he was. The murder horrified quiet, complacent, prosperous Holland, a country that prides itself on being a bastion of tolerance, and sent shock waves across Europe and around the world. Shortly thereafter, Ian Buruma returned to his native country to try to make sense of it all and to see what larger meaning should and shouldn’t be drawn from this story. The result is Buruma’s masterpiece: a book with the intimacy and narrative control of a true-crime page-turner and the intellectual resonance we’ve come to expect from one of the most well-regarded journalists and thinkers of our time. Ian Buruma’s entire life has led him to this narrative: In his hands, it is the exemplary tale of our age, the story of what happens when political Islam collides with the secular West and tolerance finds its limits.
The Dinner by Herman Koch
A summer’s evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse – the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.
Each couple has a fifteen year old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act: an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children, and as civility and friendship disintegrates, each couple show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.
Enjoy our election of great crime thrillers set in Amsterdam!
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