Latest Crime Fiction News!
… strings of snot and slime spat against the white walls…
MORE THAN NAKED (Bloter dan bloot)
|
The Stones blaring from the speakers. The van exploded with a smash and a bang and out of the red hot ball of fire tumbled a charred body, its head sticky like a roast chicken. Get your kicks bam bam on Route bam bam 66. Such noise, drives you mad. Money everywhere. Swiss and French francs, Dutch guilders, Sterling, Russian rouble, Japanese Yen and Belgian francs. The telephone started ringing. ‘Another corpse for breakfast?’ Marie-Thérèse yelled from the bathroom. Enough bloodshed, enough dead bodies in the snow. A prostitute blinked her cat’s eye lashes. Don’t push, don’t jump the queue, everyone in their turn. It started snowing again. A soft, melancholy snow that looked like silver confetti. Hell, such beastly weather. No problem actually, beast don’t go to a prostitute.
|
|
More than Naked—the sequel to Deader than Dead—is again an extremely fast-paced, blood-curdling thriller. This is crime fiction to die for. After a heist on the Central Bank of Belgium, a bunch of bank robbers are on the run with two heavy pallets—two tons—of stolen banknotes. What now?
|
A fragment:
|
‘Down on your knees, cowboy,’ Bruxman said. ‘You know the rules. You cheat once and that’s the end of it. Such is the law in crime land. Let’s toss. Heads or tails. Heads, you live. Tails, you die.’
Bruxman flipped a coin and grabbed the Browning and the Beretta and pulled the triggers, his arms outstretched—not a bang but a flash and plok! followed by yellow lightning and again plok! and plok! and again—and buried four bullets in the cowboy’s forehead. No background music and without administering the last sacraments. The guns spilled copper cartridges that danced the table like musical notes. Suddenly the room was thick with smoke. The cowboy felt a crunching pain first and only then did he hear the shots. His skull cracked and burst as if a bomb had exploded inside his head and strings of snot and slime spat against the white walls. He stayed upright, like an extra in a bad B-movie, only his left shoulder sank some three inches, his dead eyes staring at the reddish sludge that spattered the ceiling.
Blood trickled from his nose.
Dangled on his lips.
No crying,
|
no death-struggle, nothing.
WHO IS AFRAID
OF THE BIG BAD WOLF
BIG BAD WOLF
WHO IS AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF?
‘Is he dead?’ Choco asked.
‘Deader than dead,’ Bruxman said.
The coin had flipped onto the floor and rolled and swivelled until it started spinning round and bumped against the door and fell sideways against the skirting board.
‘Tails!’ Linda shouted.
‘You see?’ Bruxman said quietly.
‘As good as the best Sjöwall and Wahlöö.’--PagiA
|
|
"Dear Stan, Good luck with the new book."
Ed McBain
|
|
Dear Stan,
Last night, I started reading Doder dan dood, your latest thriller. Read in a daze untill 2 A.M. Slept for a few hours and when I woke up, I started reading again. Finished your book at 6 A.M. Splendid, Stan. Your best crime fiction to date. This is going to be a smashing hit.
Filip Marsboom, journalist
|
|
Hello Stan,
If I my use your surname. What a fan I am---in your books, you can smell the stench, taste the blood, everything is told in such detail, as if you, as a reader, are part of the story. And what a good read it is! Like real life, beautiful sometimes, raw and brutal at other times, as a good thriller should be… Looking forward to your next book.
Greetings, Eric Syvertsen
|
|
Hello Stan,
Read Rode rozen in one go. A fascinating book and a superb plot. Your writing is so sharp, sometimes it really hurts. I’ll definitely go for your other crime fiction too.
Jean-Pierre
|
|
DEADER THAN DEAD (Doder dan dood)
(From the blurb:) Slowly, it started snowing. Over the barrel of his rifle, the sharpshooter looked at his victims on the other side of the street. A yellow bi-plane flow around the fairytale-castle that was the National Bank building. So much money stacked in the safe, it was a pain to the eye. Money stinks, they say. Money is the mud of the earth. Rubbish twice. Tower bells in the cathedral banged simultaneously and dazzling fireworks illuminated the night sky. Bam-bam-bam. Bullets pierced the cold winter air and party-goers stumbled through the snow, dripping blood, holding their bowels like spaghetti in their hands. Waves rippled around the pier and in the River Scheldt, a dead body washed ashore. Midnight. One single funeral bell tolled over the city. It was frighteningly beautiful.
|
Norway's Giga Forlag has acquired Norwegian rights.
|
|
Hold-up!
On the triangular courtyard, two Playmobil- size men started unloading blue and green parcels from a security van on Europallets. He didn’t need a drawing to see what they were handling: cash money, wrapped in plastic. A treasure-trove of German marks, French and Swiss francs, guilders, dollars, Sterling, roubles, Japanese yen and Belgian francs was horded into the underground safe that was as heavily guarded as Fort Knox.
|
|
The hold-up of a lifetime, he thought.
I’ll be the one responsible for the hold-up of a lifetime.
‘Im-pos-si-ble,’ the head banker said. ‘Do I make myself clear, Inspector? This is not a shoebox we’re in, this is the National Bank. I’m telling you, a hold-up is im-pos-si-ble.’
Stan Lauryssens carries you away with his simple plan for the perfect hold-up.
HET NIEUWSBLAD, 12 March 2005
|
Deader than Dead explodes in a breathtaking finale.—METRO
‘… I should have robbed the bank myself.’ Stan Lauryssens, as quoted in METRO
|
BLACK SNOW (Zwarte sneeuw)
A man in black scurried past ravaged houses. His leather shoes made a rasping sound on the wet cobblestones. Klik-klak, klik-klak. It had been raining heavily. Belgian weather, as they say. From an all-night pub nearby, the jukebox belched the desperate voice of Doris Day singing Que Sera Sera. What will be, will be. The man in black rang the bell and when she opened the door, her mouth burst open and crackled and flaked like a smile on an old painting and something snapped in the back of her neck with the dull sound of broken plywood.
Was this the beginning?
Or the end?
Or was it the beginning of the end?
Black Snow is the first book in a trilogy of action-packed and blood-curling crime thrillers that walk in the footsteps of such masters of police procedural as the late Simenon, Sjöwall & Wählöö and Ed McBain. Working from a damp and sinister courthouse at the edge of the city of Antwerp, the police detectives won’t get any sleep for days and nights to come.
|
|
DEAD CORPSES (Dode lijken)
A team of police detectives led by an elderly Inspector tries to untangle the riddle of the strangled artist. Why did the murderer cut off her nipples? What did he do to her vagina? Using thin copper wire as a noose, a police detective hanged himself at the house of a girlfriend. In a heroine supermarket, drug tourists are shot at random, killing six, including a baby. For the police detectives, this meant working around the clock. The courthouse was in a perpetual state of alarm. On top of all that, the Inspector had problems of his own: his libido was failing him and his doctor put him on a diet of Viagra and testosterone injections.
The powerful and gritty Dead Corpses, packed with tension and surprise, is the second book in this remarkable crime fiction trilogy situated in the city of Antwerp, where on hot summer days the asphalt melts in the streets and a team of police detectives stumbles from one corpse onto another.
|
|
RED ROSES (Rode rozen)
(From the blurb:) The girl was sprawled on the edge of the lake, her face buried deep in mud. Nowhere a trace of blood. The warning If you use this road, it will be at your own risk was signposted in between the trees. A dead man in the mortuary suffered an erection and in a sidestreet, a Russian mafia king was shot dead, three bullets in his belly. That wasn’t a problem really. Even when alive, he was already as good as dead. In the underground tunnel, a rapist was singing a nursery rhyme while Fatima was dangling from a lamp post, a Boston Strangler knot firmly tied around her neck. The Inspector listened to the gulls. They miaouw like kittens, he thought. Cold rain fell from a misty sky.
Red Roses is the third book in a crime fiction trilogy that started with Black Snow and Dead Corpses. From gritty realism to blood-curling drama and action-packed suspense through the most wonderfully humorous dialogue in a city where rain is definitely wetter than rain on previous days and the crime squad stumbles from one disaster to another in some of the best police procedural stories ever.
‘A jewel.’—DE MORGEN
‘Highly original.’—DE STANDAARD
‘Action-packed.’—KNACK-MAGAZINE
‘Explosive.’—DAG ALLEMAAL
|
|
|