The House of Dolls

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Pieter Vos was once one of Amsterdam’s top police officers. An acclaimed gang buster, Vos’s career fell to pieces when his teenage daughter vanished, presumed kidnapped then murdered by an organised crime syndicate in revenge for Vos’s actions.

Two years on he’s reduced to living in a dilapidated houseboat on the Prinsengracht canal, in the local city neighbourhood of the Jordaan. And spending much of his days in the Rijksmuseum, staring at a historic doll’s house that somehow seems to be linked to his daughter’s case.

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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.

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The House of Dolls is published by Pan Macmillan in English and as Poppenhuis in Dutch by Meulenhoff Boekerij. An audiobook version narrated by Saul Reichlin and a large print version are available from WF Howes.

The book has been optioned for Dutch TV by Eyeworks.

spacer Read more about the background to the book, see some of David’s research photos and videos and download a free ebook on the background to the story.

Margaret Cannon in the Toronto Globe & Mail makes the ‘superb’ book one of the paper’s top ten summer reads…

‘Setting is always essential to Hewson and he evokes everything from scent to scenery. Here, he begins with a policewoman and a missing girl. She is attempting to engage Pieter Vos, once a Dutch detective, in discussing two crimes. One missing girl disappeared last week. The other, Vos’s daughter, Anneliese, has been missing for three years. Vos left the police and lives as a recluse on a houseboat, still searching for clues. Now, it may be possible to solve the case and reignite his life. You won’t put this one down.’


Out in 2015

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The second Pieter Vos book, The Wrong Girl, will appear in May in the UK from Pan Macmillan. The Dutch version, Het Verkeerde Meisje, will be out from Boekerij in September.

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And look out for David’s first Italian novel in some years, The Flood. A standalone set in Florence mainly in 1986 it will be published by Severn House in the UK in July and in the US in October.

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