The Perfidious Parrot Book

In a shabby bar on Aruba, a retired Dutch police commissioner eats stewed pears, talks about Gabriel García Márquez with a cab driver and a prostitute, and listens to a four-man percussion band play what he recognizes as "a Bach cantata he had once heard in Vienna." This can only be Janwillem van de Wetering territory--that slightly surreal world stretching from Amsterdam to Maine that has grown to include Key West, Florida, and various portions of the Caribbean. Ex-Amsterdam cops Grijpstra and de Gier have now gone private, seeking to avoid work while their former commissioner manages the huge cache of drug money they stumbled on and appropriated. Threats and cajolery send them reluctantly off to search for the thieves who siphoned a cargo of oil bound for Cuba from a tanker owned by a fascinatingly obnoxious father-and-son team out of Rotterdam. The titular parrot, by the way, is a bar in Key West, where lap dancing and information are served up along with the multicolored drinks. Soho Press has also published quality paperback editions of two earlier van de Wetering books: Hard Rain and The Rattle-Rat.Read More