DEKOK AND BEGGING DEATH

When Albert Cornelis Verbruggen, well-connected managing director of the Ysselstein Bank, gets a note hinting that his infant grandson will be kidnaped during his christening at Amsterdam’s historic Wester Church, Detective-Inspector DeKok and his partner, Inspector Dick Vedder, are dispatched to keep an eye on the ceremony while ten constables patrol the area outside the church. But the kidnaping of young Albert LaCroix is one of the few felonies that doesn’t get committed. Instead, when DeKok introduces himself to Stella LaCroix, the child’s mother, she faints away and later disappears from her hospital room. By that time, her father, the eminent banker, has been shot to death in the apartment of Carla Herten, a prostitute he had long patronized, and evidently shot as he knelt on the carpet, begging for his life. Another series of threats’some by letter quoting the baptismal service (“I have called thee by thy name; thou art Mine”), some in person (“Someone should stop him personally . . . . That someone is me”)—lead DeKok and Vedder to a walk on the wild side among some of Carla Herten’s less savory clients, and ultimately to what looks like the world’s least appetizing choice of suspects: DeKok’s boss, Judge-Advocate Jules Schaap, or Peter Bowen, who swore revenge on Verbruggen numerous times before he died. The routine solution, though, doesn’t fulfill the promise of the inventive setup, making this 18th of DeKok’s US appearances (DeKok and Murder in Ecstasy, 1998, etc.) one of his lesser efforts.