René AppelReviews

Won this book thru the Early Review program. Too many other books to read. I choose not to read it (especially after not being able to finish Berlin Noir which I also won, and ultimately gave it away. I gave it a 1/2 star only to indicate in my tracking that it was a DNF. It doesn't indicate the quality of the work itself½

Another great collection of crime from the Noir series. I love the way they used the movies as a theme and organizing principle. The stories were varied and fun if you like crime. I have a lot of fun with these books and always find things to enjoy and new authors to explore. It's always a treat and they read quickly too.

Fourteen of The Netherlands’ premier authors of crime and literary fiction contributed stories to this collection, with the editors—top-rated crime authors themselves—providing the fifteenth. Amsterdam Noir is the latest in Akashic Books’ long-running series of place-based crime anthologies.
If this enterprise is in part intended to impart a vision of the locale and its residents through the lens of crime, this collection is another success. Whenever a story purports to represent a certain place, you can fairly ask yourself, could these events have unfolded this way anywhere else? Geography, history, and culture all affect what can and does take place in a city and the official and unofficial reactions to events.
Appel and Pachter assigned the stories to four broad headings inspired by classic film noir, and below I briefly describe a story or two under each of their headings. The collection includes both well established authors, like Theo Capel, and writers new to the scene, like Karin Amatmoekrim. Meet some of the very best Dutch crime writers, right here in these pages.
Out of the Past
Welcome to Amsterdam by Michael Berg is a story of revenge—a revenge the wronged man never thought he could achieve. It’s pretty strong stuff. Berg was the 2013 winner of the Golden Noose, the award for the best Dutch-language crime novel of the year. Herman Koch, who wrote 2013’s best-selling crime novel, The Dinner, contributed Ankle Monitor, which launches with a brilliant first line: “Maybe it was a mistake to go back to my old neighborhood on the very first day of a weekend leave.” No stopping reading there.
Kiss Me Deadly
All three of these stories are about ill-conceived love and all are written by women, interestingly. Silent Days by Karin Amatmoekrim proves that just because a woman is old and alone doesn’t mean she is helpless.
Touch of Evil
Here you have Satan himself, a pedophile, an alcoholic fratricide, and a man channelling Ted Bundy (for an international touch), plus a hard-working police detective who unexpectedly comes out on top in Theo Capel’s entertaining Lucky Sevens.
They Live By Night
Echoing that film’s theme of inescapable tragedy, most of these stories are from the victim’s point of view, but Abdelkader Benali’s The Girl at the End of the Line is told through the eyes of a Moroccan police officer assigned to find the killer of a Muslim girl. Winner of a top literary prize, Benali opens this story, “A farmer found her with her head facing southeast, toward Mecca, as if in prayer.” It’s an effective reminder of the pluralistic culture of Western European cities today and a strong intimation of the layers of social complexity the story will probe.

This is the second noir compilation I've read from this publisher (I've also read Belfast Noir) and while it wasn't my favorite, it wasn't bad. Some of the short stories in this are clearly better than others, but that's bound to happen when you have fifteen different authors spinning tales of deceit, darkness, murder, and intrigue. The thing I most enjoyed about this collection (and all in this series) is that the setting (Amsterdam) plays such a crucial element in every story. These dark, gritty stories make you feel as if you really are in Amsterdam. Some of the short stories deal with gangs, psychotic episodes, murder, revenge, and twisted fantasies. Again some are clearly better than others, but don't let that get in the way of reading this!

Amsterdam Noir is an excellent addition to the uncommon mystery anthology series Akashic Noir. In this edition, editors René Appel and Josh Pachter selected twenty-two short stories that evoke the noir sensibilities of Amsterdam. They took inspiration from four classic noir films. Out of the Past, Kiss Me Deadly, Touch of Evil, and They Live By Night. What a genius idea!

The four stories in Out of the Past are rooted in past experiences, of war, marriage, grief, and even a long-ago murder. I thought they were all strong stories but particularly loved Spui 13. The next section, Kiss Me Deadly, has three stories of love, though Silent Days is not about romantic love at all, but the kind of sisterhood that can make a woman defend another woman she doesn’t even know because she wants to do something to be proud of. A Touch of Evil has four stories and three are clearly representations of evil’s malignancy, but Lucky Sevens strikes me differently. A woman is murdered and that is evil, but the killer is not a central character. The last section, They Lived by Night, has four stories. I thought The Girl at the End of the Line was haunting and beautifully done.

I loved Amsterdam Noir and think its selection of stories was excellent and the way they were organized was a stroke of genius. There were a few stories that were not as strong as the rest and oddly, the weakest story was Starry, Starry Night by the co-editors. I suppose there had to be some tie-in to Van Gogh somewhere, but having a guy named Vincent get his ear slashed by muggers is not it. I appreciated the sly effort, but it turned out to sound like something they concocted during a beer-addled, and-then-we-can conversation.

I received an e-galley of Amsterdam Noir from the publisher through Edelweiss

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/02/04/amsterdam-noir-by-rene-ap...

I've been a fan of the Akashic Noir series for some time and get excited when they are set in cities I have some familiarity with. When I had a chance to pick up a review copy of Amsterdam Noir, a city I visited just a couple of years ago and a country I lived in for five years as youth, I was jumping for joy.

While none of the stories in this book are bad, this was a disappointment for me. There were no memorable standout stories, and I didn't feel that most of the stories gave me a great sense of the city. The one exception was Seven Bridges, by Max van Olden, a revenge tale set on a canal cruise. While others give hints of the city, in most cases, they could be set anywhere.

That's not to say they aren't well written, or engaging stories. A young man visited by the ghost of Ted Bundy and a couple of stories based on true crime show some real interest.

I also like how the stories were organized thematically around classic noir movies.

Looking forward to more books in the series.½

This latest addition to the Noir series is a collection of short stories set in various neighborhoods around the title city. This makes the stories more interesting since only one story in each book can be set in each of the city’s famous locales. Each story is also written by a different author, each bringing their own style, perspective, experience and personality into their story.

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of stories—each is well-written and evocative its setting and characters.

Four of the stories really stood out to me as the best in the collection. “The Tower,” is a classic train wreck in slow motion—you can see how awful it is going to be, yet you can’t turn away. Similarly, but yet in a very different way is “Get Rich Quick” in which two young me realize all too quickly that they are in way over their heads. In “Seven Bridges,” the city’s famed canals are the stage for a young woman to witness the unraveling of her life. A more straightforward story in “The Man on the Jetty,” captures both a sense of rough justice as well as a glimpse into immigrant life in one of Europe’s most open cities.

There are a dozen other stories in the collection that each follow their own dark twists on human nature, the evils of personal vengeance and the ugliness of greed in action.

If you enjoy the Noir series, this is a worthy addition to the series. If you haven’t yet read any of the series—this is a good and dark place to start.

I've read lots of short story collections, very little of anything set in Amsterdam, and apparently no noir until now. I typically enjoy experiencing different writing styles in quick succession. This book delivers on that expectation and was enjoyable to read over a few sessions during a winter break. I learned just how dark noir can be. Most of the stories provided an enjoyable level of insight into the hard side of human nature. A few of the stories went further than I would care to read again. I'll take suspense over horror. This book delivers both in an experience that will make you think about at least some of the characters and scenes the next day.

The Noir series from Akashic books is of reliably good quality, as a general rule. New noir stories centered around a city (occasionally another geography) with each story tied specifically to an area within the city. This focus on place is the strength of the best stories in the series. As a corollary the best volumes are probably those for cities the reader knows best.

I don’t know Amsterdam well, but his volume strikes me as one of the better ones. Some of the stories sit too obviously on the page, but most are successful in describing a milieu, denizens of a subculture, or a satisfying story. Story is the point in the fewest numbers of stories. And Noir, as found in these stories, is Dark.

Dark tales set in one of my favorite cities. This one [in the noir series] seems to be trying to outdo the previous iterations in how dark and brutally realistic it is, but as it is with noir cinema, the realism is refreshing. This will not make it to the feel good of Hollywood, but informs us from a Dutch perspective. Not a particularly joy-filled read, but each story is riveting. Lots of tension, lots of suspense. I suppose it's an outdated preference, but could have done without the story told in the first person where the narrator dies - is he writing from the grave?

A wonderful series of short stories by different authors from Holland writing in the Noir genre, I totally recommend this book as well as others that take place in other cities around the world! "Amsterdam Noir" reveals the uniqueness of the darker side of different neighborhoods in this European city and some of the stories will probably shock readers. The characters are varied and range from two women who are friends living together when one is kidnapped and murdered to a woman working on a small cruise ship whose new boyfriend is killed by a former one.

Once you read this book, I think you will want to read the others in the Noir Series. Sometimes the stories can be quite dark or violent but they all have interesting characters, take place in fascinating environments and never fail to jolt the reader. Grab a copy and get ready for some fast-paced reading!

READ IN DUTCH


Ik ben altijd een beetje sceptisch tegenover Nederlandse thrillers en met name als ze literair genoemd worden. Ik begrijp het meestal niet. Maar toen ik Van twee kanten (René Appel) kreeg besloot ik het met frisse moed nog maar eens te proberen.

Het begint op de begrafenis van de vader van Fransien. Hier ontmoet ze Rob, met wie ze daarna ook een relatie krijgt. Maar hij begint steeds meer te vragen, en zij krijgt niets terug. Hoe moet zij zich uit zijn netten bevrijden?

Het tempo in het boek is erg snel, in amper 300 pagina's wordt een heleboel verteld. Helaas is hier wel een gevolg van dat er weinig wordt uitgediept en wordt er veel gesprongen in het verhaal. Het verhaal zelf vond ik niet zo geweldig in elkaar zitten. De gebeurtenissen zijn wel erg vreemd en sommige personages zijn erg vlak. Het leest wel makkelijk, maar de schrijfstijl zou ik ook niet literair willen noemen. Het is gewoon niet het genre voor mij, die Nederlandse thrillers. En toevallig was er een vriendin van mij die René Appel ook ontzettend vond tegenvallen.

A good thriller :-)

Some time ago I received this book as a gift in the book shop, for the Month of thriller-books 2005, and only now I've finally read it :-)

How can a man put himself in such trouble, for me that's nearly unimaginable. Two couples who seemingly have everything their heart's desires, who should be happy with what they have and can afford to do. And yet they act strangely, they cheat on one another, they are unhappy, they want to get out, do things differently. Anything to make it different than it is now.
And that ultimately culminates in murder.

What I did not understand in the text on the back, is the mention of the other secret that Sylvia is hiding. Maybe I overlooked it. In a while I'll read again, maybe I'll see it then.

Las lekker weg, nergens heel erg spannend.

Gouden Strop 2001