The Harbour Master
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Daniel Pembrey
DANIEL PEMBREY grew up in Nottinghamshire beside Sherwood Forest. He studied history at Edinburgh University and received an MBA from INSEAD business school. Daniel then spent over a decade working in America and more recently Luxembourg, coming to rest in Amsterdam and London - dividing his time now between these two great maritime cities. He is the author of the The Harbour Master - the first book in the Henk van der Pol detective series - and several short thriller stories, and he contributes articles to publications including The Financial Times,The Times, The Guardian, The New European and The Field. His Henk van der Pol series is the product of time spent living in the docklands area of East Amsterdam, counting De Druif bar as his local. danielpembrey.com
Read more from Daniel Pembrey
The Harbour Master Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Night Market Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for The Harbour Master
20 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It takes an incredibly talented writer to pull off a novella. With the shorter form (usually a third of a full-length novel), it's very hard to encompass everything that makes a great story - characterization, backstory, atmosphere, setting and a complex or involving plot. Daniel Pembrey's "The Harbour Master" manages it all seemingly effortlessly.
Henk, as well as his wife, daughter and an assortment of other recurring characters, are very well drawn and make you feel that you know them right from the start. The author excels at descriptions of people and place. The way he paints a picture for you is such that the Red Light District of Amsterdam was almost palpable. I felt as if I were walking the streets with him, seeing and touching everything Henk did, and experiencing the sense of growing doom as each piece of this intricate puzzle unfolded. By the end of the book, I almost felt as if I'd been to Amsterdam.
There really was not a flaw in this... each scene just naturally pulled you along to the next until you absolutely couldn't wait to find out what was going on. The only thing that could make this better would be an endless stream of novels about Henk, or a mini-series based on these books. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Having seen favourable reviews I was looking forward to reading this but ended up disappointed. I found the characters a bit hard to remember and didn't feel much empathy with the main character Henk.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I bought this book on impulse, being in Amsterdam at the time and intrigued to see this English novel on sale in Schiphol Airport. The setting is accurately conveyed, and lends a depth to the story. Henk van der Pol is a jaded and cynical detective, based in Amsterdam’s IJ Tunnel police station, whose beat covers the central railway station, the harbour and the famous red light district. With thirty years’ service behind him, van der Pol has seen it all, and is weary from the infighting between his senior officers, and their relentless efforts to harvest favourable publicity.As the novel opens, van der Pol has himself witnessed the discovery of a woman’s body floating in the harbour. She had been beaten before being dumped in the water, and it emerges that she had been a prostitute working in the nearby red light district. Van der pol puts feelers out to try to discover more about her, but no-one is talking, not even his regular informants within the city’s murky underworld. As the investigation proceeds, a number of people become implicated: senior police officers, politicians and gangsters. There is even a cameo appearance from some Russian Hell’s Angels, and van der Pol also finds himself in Brussels, immersed in red tape.I enjoyed the book but felt that Pembrey just tried too hard. Like a lot of crime books that I have read recently, he seemed more concerned with generating as many intricacies of plot as possible, rather than concentrating on developing a sound, coherent story line and relying upon the quality of his writing and the strength of his characters to sustain the novel.