The second novel in the acclaimed, best-selling Euro-crime series that began with the Hercule Poirot Award winner, Absinthe. If the world will end in flames, who is stoking the fire? Walter Eekhaut, the veteran chief inspector from the Brussels police force who has a problem with authority, remains in Amsterdam, where he was dispatched to aid the Dutch security service. When his boss, Chief Superintendent Alexandra Dewaal, receives a tip from one of her informants, the two find themselves across the border in his home country, tramping in the Belgian Ardennes on a frigid January day. What they find is macabre and horrific: seven charred human bodies, attached to tall stakes with chains, in an almost perfect circle. From the look of it, these people were burned alive in some sort of ritual. On the wall of a cabin, Eekhaut and Dewaal find the enigmatic message: "This World seems to last Forever. But it is merely the Dream of a Sleeper." Similar...

Walter Eeckhaut, a veteran of the Belgian police force who has a problem with authority, is dispatched to Amsterdam to aid the Dutch security service in investigating the activities of a well-connected Russian oligarch, with connections to Putin. Some of the Russian's business is certainly legitimate, but some may well not be. In Amsterdam, Eeckhaut is seconded to Chief Superintendent Alexandra Dewaal and her team, and begins to learn about the city's shady underside. He is at once pulled into another case, the murder of a young leftist dissident, alleged to have stolen a sensitive list from the Amsterdam offices of a right-ring political party—a list with the name of secret donors. The hunt for the killer leads to a knot of black money interests and illegal dealings that pit the Russian mob and Dutch politicians and business leaders against the police and anyone else who tries to get in their way. Absinthe is the gripping first installment in the bestselling...