Love in Amsterdam Author:Nicolas Freeling Alluring, unstable, and frantically self-absorbed, Elsa de Charmoy was a dangerous woman, and now shes a dead one, shot with a gun bought by Martin, her former lover. Sulking in an Amsterdam jail, Martin swears its been years since he saw Elsa, but Inspector Van der Valk isnt quite ready to be persuaded. Like Inspector Maigret ... more »(to whom he is often compared), Van der Valk tends to chew over the details, ideally over a good meal. And while Van der Valks ruminations may frustrate his more action-minded colleagues, they inevitably yield a surprising resolution. Freeling knew both prison and good meals: Mistakenly arrested while working as a chef in a Dutch hotel, he began writing Love in Amsterdam on paper swiped from his jailhouse job wrapping bars of soap. The soaps loss was readers gain: Freeling went on to win every important prize in mystery fiction in the U.S., France, and the UK. The first in the Van der Valk series« less