Saskia Noort, The Dinner Club

The Dinner Club

Saskia Noort

Bitter Lemon, Apr 2007, $14.95

ISBN: 1904738206

The inferno destroyed the villa, killing wealthy Evert Struyck; his wife Babette was injured but their two children, Luuk and Beau, managed to escape. Babette's four female friends (Karen van de Made, Patricia Vogel, Hanneke Lemstra and Angela Bijlsma) who make up, along with her, the female part of "the dinner club" couples, try to help the distraught woman. Adding to the shock is that the police found Evert's "farewell" note in his car asking the others for forgiveness leading to the police to conclude suicide.

However, not long afterward, Hanneke falls from a hotel balcony. Unable to ignore what is happening to her friends and fearing her family is next, Karen begins to piece together the motive behind the two deaths as she begins to understand that The Dinner Club and its male spousal equivalent are tied not by friendship and caring, but by crime and adultery.

The tale starts off as an extended family drama in which the audience sees how each of the surviving seven members of the Dinner Club and their offspring cope with the first death of one of them though that look is mostly filtered by Karen. Halfway into the story, when Karen calls to speak to Hanneke but instead gets an Amsterdam cop, the storyline turns into an amateur sleuth mystery. Thus the audience will know the key players at least through the Karen sieve before the thriller kicks into first gear. Well-written but somewhat slow at first, this is a fine Dutch mystery.

Harriet Klausner