Carl Carson has a prosperous business, a dotty wife, and a fictitious son. When financial ruin threatens, he puts all these resources to use by staging an elaborate 'kidnapping' and liquidating his assets to pay the ransom. It might have worked, if Sir John Appleby hadn't been his neighbour. Read More...

'It was the smell that Mrs Powell noticed first. Slightly sweet. Slightly unpleasant ... It shocked her badly to find a dead man in the corner, his head slumped on his knees.' Who was Billy Blake, other than a homeless alcoholic who wandered the streets? Read More...

Twelve hours after a woman's broken body is washed up on a deserted shore on the south coast of England, her traumatized three-year-old daughter is discovered twenty miles away walking the streets of Poole, alone and apparently abandoned ... Read More...

A woman found shot dead in a flat in provincial Holland leaves behind her a daughter of doubtful parentage and a dull soldier husband. Van der Valk discovers strange links with Dien Bien Phu. Read More...

Two women had committed suicide, and a third had to be led away by men in white coats. There had been an outbreak of anonymous letters, but there was something much more, and Inspector Van der Valk wonders what lies behind the small-town imoralities, eavesdropping and hysteria. Read More...

Why does Van der Valk feel involved with the pretty daughter of a famous dead conductor? Then he finds the man with the flick-knife between his ribs... Read More...

Henri Castang, 30-year veteran of the French National Police, finds some dirty and dangerous work waiting for him. A gruesome murder of a young woman, a very pretty, very young and very hostile young prostitute and intrigue within his own department. Read More...

The last Van der Valk. Cops don't have 9 lives. He should have left well alone. Read More...

Ada Sergent, a respectable widow, has vanished, leaving her small hotel, her distressed regulars - and no forwarding address. And a puzzled Castang. Read More...

A dazzling variation on the traditional crime story is which the question, for Castang, is not who did it, but whether it was done at all... Successful landscaper Guy Lefebvre and his wife Sybille are driving through the Vosges, when a flaming row results in Sybille slamming out of the car. She is never seen again. Read More...