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  • Bibliography:
    46 Books (2 Series)
  • First Book:
    August 1957
  • Latest Book:
    September 2016
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Full Series List in Order

A Henry Castang Mystery

1 - A Dressing of Diamond (1974)
2 - The Bugles Blowing (1976)
3 - Sabine (1977)
4 - The Night Lords (Feb-1980)
5 - Castang's City (Sep-1981)
6 - Wolfnight (May-1983)
7 - The Back of the North Wind (Nov-1983)
8 - No Part in Your Death (Dec-1984)
9 - A City Solitary (Jun-1985)
10 - Cold Iron (Nov-1986)
11 - Lady Macbeth (1988)
12 - Not As Far As Velma (Jun-1989)
13 - Those in Peril (1990)
14 - The Flanders Sky (Sep-1992)
15 - You Know Who (1993)
16 - The Seacoast of Bohemia (Jun-1995)
17 - A Dwarf Kingdom (Jul-1996)

Inspector Van Der Valk

1 - Love in Amsterdam (1962)
2 - Because of the Cats (1963)
3 - Gun Before Butter (1963)
4 - Double Barrel (1964)
5 - Criminal Conversation (1965)
6 - The King of the Rainy Country (1966)
7 - The Dresden Green (1966)
8 - Strike Out Where Not Applicable (1967)
9 - Tsing-Boum (1969)
10 - The Lovely Ladies (1971)
11 - Aupres de ma Blonde (1972)
12 - The Widow (1979)
13 - One Damn Thing After Another // Arlette (1981)
14 - Sand Castles (1989)
15 - A Long Silence (Nov-2011)

Book List in Order: 46 titles





    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy

    A woman, Elsa, is brutally murdered in her Amsterdam apartment. Her ex-lover, Martin, is seen outside the building around the time of the crime. The witness who saw him? A policeman. It looks like a straightforward case -- but police inspector Van...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    A shocking case of robbery and rape thrusts Inspector Van der Valk into the center of a sinister teenage gang. Bloemendaal aan Zee is a pleasant town of modern buildings, high incomes, happy families, and little crime. So when teenage vandalism su...



    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy

    A Van der Valk Thriller—Winner of the Crime Writer''s Award and the Grand Prix de Roman Policier.

    Police Inspector Piet Van der Valk becomes involved in an extraordinary case when he crosses the path of a pretty daughter of a famous d...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    They told Inspector Van der Valk to pose as a bureaucrat, go to the dreariest town in Northern Holland and forget he was a policeman. They wanted him and his wife to become small-town eavesdroppers like everybody else. Just to find out who was writin...



    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    The patient, hunch-playing policeman Van der Valk struggles with a corpse which has no identity and then too many.... A first-rate story of crime and detection, says the New York Times. "Subtly powerful" "Freeling is the best. The Londoner is as good...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Van der Valk is on the case again as a mysterious letter is unearthed alluding to the murder of a man named Cabestan. In the letter, the murderer is named but van der Valk must find out first who this mysterious letter-writer is. What transpires i...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    The placid freedom from whiling away the hours on holiday seems like a dream. But there's no rest for the wicked. At least, not where Louis Schweitzer is concerned. After a day in the countryside, Schweitzer is back home, having murdered two victims ...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    "

    This was the end of the story that had started ""Once upon a time, in a rainy country, there was a king...."" The end had not happened in a rainy country, but on a bone-dry Spanish hillside, 300 metres from where Van der Valk had left a lot of bl...






    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Van der Valk finds small-town life a bore -- until the "accidental death" of the local innkeeper proves not accidental at all! The White Horse, a convivial inn run by an extraordinarily handsome man and his very attractive wife, is the social cent...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Esther Marx, wife of a dull Dutch sergeant, is machine-gunned to death in her dreary apartment, and the trail leads back to events in Vietnam, in Dien Bien Phu , in 1954. A Freeling classic....



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    What''s the connection between an elderly businessman who''s been stabbed to death on the streets of Amsterdam and three lovely Dutch expatriates living as housewives in Dublin? That''s the central question of The Lovely Ladies and it''s one that ...




  • Nicolas Freeling introduces a subtle and highly complex character in the shape of police detective Piet Van der Valk in this thriller, triggered by a street stabbing with a difference. Freeling gives an astute, imaginative breakdown of the world of v...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    For Colette Delavigne, one of France's youngest judges, life takes a terrifying twist when she returns from work one night to find her daughter has been abducted. Henri Castang is sought out to investigate her vanishing and Delavigne's profession ...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    A European city, bathed in the sultry heat of a summer afternoon and a telephone call announcing a triple murder. Henri Castang is called into action in this profound and disturbing crime fiction. To protect himself, he must play by the rules but i...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Sabine Arthur is a rich widow. She is seventy-three. She has been a good poet. And she has come to the office of the Police Judiciare for help. She is being persecuted, she claims, and her life has been threatened -- perhaps by her son, perhaps by hi...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    A Van der Valk Thriller - Arlette Van der Valk finds herself widowed from a man who left an indelible mark on the world of crime investigation. After her initial grief, Arlette is at a loose end - Piet was her life, but Van der Valk soon finds that m...








  • A British judge and a naked corpse put French inspector Henri Castang on delicate, dangerous ground in this mystery from the Edgar Award"winning author.When a local businessman’s car is stolen, he’s more concerned about what’s inside -- the b...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Since setting up shop in Strasbourg with her new husband, Arlette, widow to the notorious Van der Valk, has garnered something of a name for herself. Getting shot at, kidnapped and blackmailed seem to have simply become a part of daily life. Being ta...



  • A French detective looks into a public figure’s murder -- and discovers some private secrets -- in a mystery by an author who is “a joy to read” (TheTimes Literary Supplement). When a local official is gunned down in the street, it looks like a...



  • The peaceful bay of Porquerolles looks out over the waters to Toulon and to Kapitan, an extraordinary drifter who lives for his beloved boat, Olivia, bobbing among the bustling blue of the shores. Kapitan is an enigma; a man who has sailed the Medite...



  • A Henri Castang Mystery - Replete with the volatile tensions of a political thriller, Freeling introduces the reader to the nebulous, frightening world of conspiracy. Henri Castang, renowned police inspector, is called in to investigate a car acciden...



  • Murder, cannibalism, political skulduggery -- it’s all in a week's work for Inspector Henri Castang. Henri Castang, a thirty-year veteran of the French National Police, returns from vacation to find some dirty and dangerous business awaiting him...




  • Three mocking, self-confident punks have vandalized the Forrestiers' home. The actual damage is minimal, but Walter Forrestier's brush with crime, and with the criminal justice system, begins to corrupt all the values he holds sacred. Forced into act...




    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    A Van der Valk thriller

    A rollicking drama of satire, humour and suspense. Can you afford to miss it?

    Guy Lefevre is a successful landscape gardener. He and his wife Sibille drive through the winding heights of the Vosges Mountains but at the e...






    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Inspector Piet van der Valk of the Amsterdam police was one of the best-loved detectives of modern crime fiction -- before his creator murdered him in a 1972 novel. Now Nicolas Freeling brings van der Valk back -- in a brilliant adventure that takes ...



  • Sent to the north of France to investigate the disappearance of middle-aged hotelier Adrienne Sergent, Inspector Henri Castang stumbles into a case involving an elderly Jewish painter, the fatal bombing of a local convent, and an erratic journalist...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Due to complaints of his handling of an earlier case, Inspector Henri Castang is transferred to Paris and a little-known backwater of the Police Judiciaire: the Fraud Repression unit of the Fine Arts division. There he is to twiddle his thumbs until ...



  • The Berlin Wall is falling. Eastern Europe is in turmoil. Amid the tumult, Inspector Henri Castang has been exiled to a bureaucratic post in Bruxelles, a city in the eye of the storm. But the forces of violence are at work even here. When a colleague...



    • / Police Procedural
    • Buy Buy

    An Irish diplomat is dead of a shotgun blast. Henri Castang, a French detective in exile, is obsessed with his friend's death, and with his friend's lover. From the land of Joyce and Yeats to the Italian Alps, Castang follows his obsession through a ...



  • Hired by a wealthy woman to find the young son that was kidnapped four years earlier, former French policeman Henri Castang ventures into Czechoslovakia, where he finds a connection between the boy and an ex-SS officer. Reprint....




  • A brutal murder sends Brussels police inspector Henri Castang reeling into retirement on the Atlantic seacoast at Biarritz. But there, the kidnapping of a child haunts both the house in which Castang and his wife, Vera, live and Castang's career itse...








  • A Henri Castang Mystery - The grisly murder of a young woman, cannibalism and political scandal rear their ugly heads in this Henri Castang mystery. And there are connections with the killings of two ordinary citizens, and a beautiful, antagonistic p...



  • In France, a police detective hunts for an elusive killer in this novel by an award-winning author who “writes like no one else” (Los Angeles Times). In the tiny French town of Soulay, Inspector Henri Castang is dealing with a brutal robbery, a d...



  • A Henri Castang Mystery - The death of a Eurocrat, links with the IRA and the European Community open this gripping thriller. Henri Castang is put on the case and sets out to find the truth but how can you find the truth when someone, somewhere will ...



  • This is a tale of love and of death in the cynical political worlds of Strasbourg and Paris ... Where the works of Jane Austen act as a relief to the spread of cancer. As we find out, there's "no one like Jane in a tight place."...



  • Henri Castang, "promoted" from Paris to Brussels, discovers that the villains of bureaucracy are as devious as those of the streets. Until his boss is arrested for murder, a child abuser becomes a crime statistic and Europe redefines its boundaries, ...



  • It was not a very important case. No crime had been committed. For Van der Valk the shady dealings of a prosperous Amsterdam jeweler were more of a private puzzle.

    Two bullets put paid to that incurable curiosity....



  • A European city, bathed in the sultry heat of a summer afternoon, and a telephone call announcing a triple murder. Henri Castang is called into action in this profound and disturbing detective story. To protect himself, he must play by the rules ...


Award-Winning Books by Nicolas Freeling

The King of the Rainy Country
1967 Edgar Allan Poe Award -- Novel


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Nicolas Freeling has published 46 books.

Nicolas Freeling does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, What Are the Bugles Blowing For?, was published in September 2016.

The first book by Nicolas Freeling, Tale of Anne D, was published in August 1957.

Yes. Nicolas Freeling has 2 series.