Extraterrestrial

How do you uncover truth when every element—water, memory, and motive—tries to bury it? In this investigative novel, you follow Detective Lotte Meerman as she navigates forensic uncertainty, family entanglements, and ethical dilemmas tracing the death of Patrick van der Linde, a businessman found drowned in Amsterdam’s IJ near the Orange Locks. The story isn’t just a murder mystery; it’s a study of how environment, emotion, and institutional bias warp the pursuit of truth.

The physical crisis: when water hides evidence

You learn early that water complicates every forensic question. The cold river preserves bodies yet blurs cause and time of death. The pathologist finds water in the lungs, confirming drowning, but also a linear cranial wound suggesting assault. Lotte must reconcile these clues: was Patrick attacked before or after he entered the river? The location—the Orange Locks—adds another puzzle, since currents can move a body far from the point of entry. (Note: real-world pathology often mirrors this ambiguity, forcing detectives to triangulate science with environmental data.)

This aspect introduces a broader theme: truth isn’t singular. Physical truth (how he died) competes with moral truth (why). Just as cold water distorts biological evidence, grief and memory distort testimony. Both must be filtered carefully.

The emotional minefield: grief and denial

Margreet van der Linde’s refusal to recognize her husband’s death captures how denial reshapes investigation. Her shock—mismatched clothes, trembling speech—signals how emotional trauma delays disclosure. Her daughter Nadia’s composure contrasts sharply; she protects the family image, worrying more about public shame than facts. Through these moments, the novel reminds you that investigators must treat mourning families not as data sources but as people negotiating identity and loss. Time, empathy, and controlled settings become investigative tools every bit as important as DNA or CCTV.

Lotte’s double life: between duty and history

The mystery turns inward when Lotte’s personal connection comes to light: her ex-husband Arjen is the son‑in‑law of the victim. Her private and public worlds now intersect painfully. She wants impartiality yet cannot escape emotional recall—the death of her child, the failed marriage, the family she left behind. Chief Inspector Moerdijk pressures her to stay because manpower is short, illustrating real policing dilemmas about ethics versus practicality. Her self‑management—limiting contact, watching interviews from behind glass—models how professionals cope when personal lives threaten objectivity.

Throughout, her rituals—a cat at home, dinners with her mother, the hesitant warmth of her boyfriend Mark—ground her sanity. You see that detectives are people first; stability outside work sustains ethical function inside it. (Compare this to the emotional toll depicted in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, where domestic fragility mirrors investigative collapse.)

Systems under strain: workplace, power, and motive

Like water to a body, culture soaks into a company’s crimescape. Inside Linde Lights—a small firm of designers and craftspeople—you see harassment minimized, loyalty weaponized, and money quietly mismanaged. Patrick’s inappropriate advances toward employee Therese, Nico’s “protective” intervention, and whispers of financial irregularities create overlapping motives. The workplace becomes a social ecosystem where power both shields abuse and seeds betrayal. Harassment proves not peripheral but catalytic; it sets in motion jealousy, retaliation, and cover‑ups that later intersect with financial fraud.

The anatomy of investigation

Step by step, you watch detectives build timelines from fragments—restaurant receipts, phone logs, CCTV frames, and contradictory witness tales. Each clue exposes bias: Arjen lies about his route home to hide embarrassment, Thomas assumes guilt based on personality, and Lotte overcorrects in defense. The team exemplifies both the necessity and fragility of procedural checks. Interviews, like currents, can drag truth away unless anchored by evidence.

As the case deepens, financial forensics expose fraud: Nico’s Ozone licensing deal, hidden transfers, and personal enrichment. His motive turns concrete—a fear of exposure. When a brick with blood residue surfaces in his wardrobe, forensics, money trail, and geography merge into one coherent narrative. The book thus fuses physical science with behavioral analysis, showing how evidence only speaks when all disciplines—hydrology, psychology, audit—are in conversation.

Ethics, bias, and redemption

By the close, the mystery gives way to moral reckoning. Lotte’s exclusion from the case, Thomas’s defensiveness, and Moerdijk’s leadership illustrate systemic responses to bias. Yet through external audit (Stefanie’s financial work) and transparent documentation, the team re‑aligns. The narrative insists that process is not procedural bureaucracy—it is the moral architecture of justice. Transparency, cooperation, and humility reconstruct what bias scattered.

Core message

When every current—emotional, institutional, literal—pulls against clarity, only the disciplined blending of forensic method, self‑awareness, and compassion can restore truth. The river may disperse evidence, but it cannot erase accountability when investigators learn to read all its flows.

The river in which Patrick’s body is found becomes the story’s first confederate and saboteur. Water both conceals and reveals. It preserves tissue, erases blood, and relocates the crime scene. Lotte and Thomas begin not with a murder site but with a hypothesis: the body could have traveled kilometers from the point of entry. Every ripple challenges the assumption that location equals origin.

Managing underwater evidence

Cold water delays decomposition, creating a wide postmortem window. You see the pathologist forced to assign a rough timeframe—Friday night to Saturday morning—an uncertainty that pushes investigators toward technology: phone pings, CCTV clocks, river‑flow simulations. The cold logic of hydrology thus meets the uncertainty of biology. Early missteps—uniformed officers dragging the body ashore prematurely—show how small breaches in protocol echo downstream, potentially contaminating crucial evidence like residue or insects on skin.

Re‑locating the scene

The Clipper restaurant, site of Patrick’s last sighting, has interior CCTV but none covering the rear patio or waterfront. That blind spot drives Lotte’s key deduction: the assault likely occurred along the unlit path near the derelict bricks, not at the patio. Her reconstruction blends physics and narrative—how far a heavy man could be dragged, where one could push him unseen, how current would carry him. The book uses this reasoning to dramatize how forensic materiality (impact angles, wound shape) replaces deductive guesswork with testable models.

From fragment to frame

Every physical detail—brick edge, wallet placement, water level—earns meaning only when contextualized. When later a brick with blood is retrieved from Nico’s wardrobe, readers realize that the river’s puzzle comes full circle: the weapon removed from the flow re‑anchors every dispersed clue. It’s an elegant metaphor for the detective’s role—retrieving coherence from drift.

Investigative takeaway

Evidence never stands still. Whether carried by current or by human emotion, it must be tracked as a moving system—an ecosystem of time, location, and decay—rather than frozen snapshots of fact.

When detectives face families, they walk into emotional weather systems, not rational data rooms. Margreet’s denial, Nadia’s restraint, and Arjen’s defensiveness show how grief, guilt, and protection distort facts. Lotte’s encounters with them underline her dual role as investigator and emotional translator.

How grief distorts memory

You see denial serve protective function: Margreet’s disbelief (“he wouldn’t drown; he could swim”) shields her from collapse. Meanwhile, Nadia organizes blame away from her father, insisting others remember him kindly. In interviews, these affective strategies delay truth but also provide diagnostic signs of family dynamics—control, dependency, shame. Lotte adapts by switching spaces, offering coffee, balancing empathy with inquiry. (Note: this human-sensitive policing resembles trauma-informed approaches now used in modern homicide units.)

Balancing care and casework

The narrative shows that compassion is procedural, not ornamental. You learn to create private environments for grieving relatives, postpone demands for identification, and document emotional states as part of context. By doing so, you respect human processing without sacrificing evidence gathering. The lesson: truth and care are not opposites; they must co‑operate.

Key insight

When emotions run high, what people refuse to say can be as informative as what they speak outright. Denial and silence mark boundaries of pain—and map where investigators must tread gently but persistently.

Lotte’s conflict of interest becomes the ethical backbone of the story. Her link to Arjen forces the department to test its own integrity. Moerdijk’s removal of her from the case isn’t just bureaucratic: it’s a stress test for how institutions face internal bias.

Transparency as defense

The investigation demonstrates why declaring personal ties matters. Lotte’s partial recusal—upsupported yet incomplete—creates ambiguity. Her colleagues oscillate between trust and suspicion. You see how secrecy breeds fracture: when she withholds her patio-versus-path insight, information silos arise. Documentation, open briefings, and independent auditors (like Stefanie on finance) become the antidotes to hidden bias. The book treats administrative process as moral practice, not paperwork.

Leadership and perception

Thomas and Charlie’s exclusion of Lotte from Arjen’s interview highlights how leadership decisions shape credibility. Their rationale—protecting the case from her subjectivity—shows that perception can equal truth in public service. Yet their move also limits access to insider understanding that could have sped clarity. It’s an ethical paradox: impartiality can both protect and paralyze an investigation.

Restoring procedural trust

When bias is confronted rather than concealed, operations recover. Through written handovers, external specialists, and re‑integration of findings, the case regains coherence. By the end, when the financial investigation links Nico to fraud and murder, Lotte’s earlier insights are vindicated—not by rebellion but by the system absorbing them transparently. The moral is quiet but clear: trust is rebuilt through disclosure, not purity.

The firm Linde Lights operates as microcosm of power and secrecy. It’s small enough for gossip to become law and large enough for abuse to hide behind hierarchy. Patrick’s harassment of Therese, Nico’s protective pose, Arjen’s strategic scheming, and Karin’s loyalty illustrate how workplaces generate motive long before violence erupts.

Toxic culture and silence

Therese’s initial reluctance to accuse her boss mirrors real HR failures. She depends on the job; colleagues prefer quiet stability to confrontation. In this atmosphere, misconduct festers. Nico’s heroism in pulling Patrick away that night appears gallant but later looks opportunistic—a bid for influence. The book uses such moments to dissect complicity: silence that feels safe but breeds danger.

Finance as hidden motive

Behind the sexual politics lies monetary deceit. Patrick’s supposed business restructuring masks deeper trouble. Through investigator Stefanie Dekkers, we learn of fake accounts and the Ozone licensing scheme funnelling money through Nico’s control. The overlap between financial and ethical corruption is deliberate—the same moral weaknesses allow both harassment and fraud to thrive. Eventually, when Patrick uncovers inconsistencies, his confrontation costs him his life.

Lesson in motive

Crimes at work rarely stem from one motive; they germinate at the junction of ego, dependency, and financial pressure. Recognize the culture before you can read the crime.

Amid procedure and pathology lies the core of detective craft: how to remain human without becoming compromised. Lotte’s story exemplifies this balance. Her control mechanisms, coping rituals, and personal attachments make clear that emotional management is as critical as evidence management.

Building resilience

You watch Lotte negotiate storms of guilt, anger, and fatigue. She steps back when overwhelmed, cries privately, keeps domestic rituals intact. These aren’t weaknesses but disciplined boundaries. Mark’s quiet companionship and her mother’s steady presence embody the psychological scaffolding behind every credible investigator. Without it, burnout and bias flourish. (Note: this depiction aligns with trauma-informed workforce models now emphasized in major police reforms.)

Institutional empathy

By pairing Lotte’s personal coping with systemic lessons—support leave, supervision, redistribution of sensitive tasks—the novel elevates empathy into organizational strategy. Caring for investigators isn’t sentimental; it’s procedural hygiene ensuring sound judgement.

Final reflection

Policing, at its best, is not about hardening against emotion but learning to conduct truth-seeking through it. Professionalism and humanity must coexist for justice to survive flood, bias, or grief.