Little Sister – Another Lowlands Thriller

Kim and Mia Timmers are twins who have spent the majority of their life locked up in a mental health facility, after being found guilty of murdering the lead singer of a once world renowned band called The Cupids. What little is known from that time is shrouded in mystery, and all the locals of the Dutch fishing village, Voldendam.

As the Timmers twins reach 21 they should no longer be kept in the facility out on the edge of the island of Marken, hidden away and forgotten, all local people knew was that it was a facility for female juvenile criminals. The girls are being assessed to see if they should be released out to a safe house in Amsterdam, where they would be able to integrate slowly back in to society.

When they do not turn up at the safe house, and nobody has heard from their nurse escort, after nearly 24 hours the police are finally informed. Pieter Vos is given the job of finding the girls and what happened to the nurse, it does not help when he tries to find the old police files on the Timmers has been deleted and paper copies shredded.

When Vos travels out to Voldendam with Laura Bakker his colleague they are in for an investigation, that the authorities want closed rapidly and no mention of the history. When they travel out to Marken, they are sure that they are not being told anywhere near the truth. When the body of the nurse escort turns washed up along Marken they know they are going to be up against things.

David Hewson draws the reader in very quickly and feel that you are at the heart of the investigation, and can see the various characters, how they think and act. Kim and Mia are written well and are completely dislikeable girls, who are angry, confused and not sure what is happening to them, there is a sort of innocence but even that does not help them.

Vos is an effective but slightly defective detective, someone the leaders can trust to get the job done, but absolutely terrible at the internal police politics. How Vos likes and trusts those officers around him and does not enjoy change, any challenge to that and it throws his equilibrium off kilter.

As the story unfolds there is an uncomfortable truth that all the police and the locals need to deal with which slowly seeps in to the story. Which helps to understand why the Timmers twins are so damaged and shows them in a more favourable light.

David Hewson’s story telling is second to none, using the skill of a scriptwriter to draw the reader in and keep them at the centre of the story throughout. The thriller with its various twists and turns, shocks and occasional violence keeps the read intrigued and wanting to know what happens next.

A truly excellent book, Little Sister is an excellent development of the Pieter Vos series, and shows why it will continue to go from strength to strength. ( )

This third police procedural in Hewson’s Netherlands series again features Amsterdam police brigadier Pieter Vos and his misfit Frieslander colleague, Laura Bakker. The story centres on the plight of Mia and Kim Timmers, a pair of orphaned girls—two from an original set of three. Mia and Kim have been institutionalized for a decade in a remote facility for young female mental patients deemed dangerous.
Ten years earlier, when the girls were 11, their parents and the third triplet, Little Jo, were murdered by parties unknown. That same night lead singer of the local pop band The Cupids was murdered and the girls accused of the crime.
The girls have aged out of their facility, and the psychiatrist in charge says they are no longer a danger. They are released. A male nurse assigned to drive them to an Amsterdam halfway house is found murdered, the girls have disappeared, and before long, another corpse is discovered. Did they do all this? Any of it? Secrets highly placed people have tried to hide for a decade are bursting to come out.
It’s a good study of the kinds and extent of evil that can occur when society judges some people not worth caring about and turns its back. Is what happens to the girls hidden or just not seen? Locating the institution on the island of Marken, connected to land (and reality, normalcy) by only a thin thread of road atop a grassy dyke, is symbolic as well as plot-relevant.
As in the earlier books in the series, Vos lives on his decrepit houseboat with wire-haired terrier Sam. Hewson’s descriptions of Amsterdam when Vos is walking Sam, for example, and of the part of the country where the sisters are from—the Waterland—are created with admirable atmospherics. He ably summons the low flat green country, its dykes and lakes, a land criss-crossed with sparkling channels where “life teemed beneath the emerald surface and nothing was quite what it seemed.”
Hewson provides plenty of interesting suspects, though some of them appear rather intermittently, and I had occasional difficulty recalling their identities. Although I enjoyed this book, it seemed about fifty pages longer than it needed to be, with some motivational untidiness around the climactic scene.
Hewson is an accomplished crime writer and has worked with Shakespeare scholar AJ Hartley on novelizations of Hamlet and Macbeth. I listened to Macbeth: The Novel, narrated by Alan Cumming, and Hewson’s prose—description of the witches, for example—was riveting. He brings that same ability to describe an environment in which difficult choices become inevitable to the story of Mia and Kim Timmers. ( )