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The Devil's Playground
 
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The Devil's Playground (Paperback)

by Stav Sherez (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 464 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd (2 Feb 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0141014067
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141014067
  • Product Dimensions: 17.6 x 11.2 x 3.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 301,192 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Product Description

Book Description

When the body of a tramp, Jake Colby, is found in a secluded Amsterdam park, Dutch police detective Ronald Van Hijn believes that this is the ninth victim of the serial killer stalking the city. Yet, all previous victims were young, female and beautiful. What could have made the killer change his MO?

On the corpse Van Hijn finds contact details for Jon Reed, an Englishman who befriended Jake in London shortly before the murder. Van Hijn summons Jon to Amsterdam to identify the body and so sets him on his own journey of discovery.

Was Jake really a tramp? What revelation about his identity led him to a life on the streets? And did his fate lie not in the hands of a serial killer but in the horror of the Holocaust death camps some 60 years before?

The Devil's Playground is a thought-provoking debut crime thriller from a stunning new young talent. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Economist

‘A gifted writer … deserves to be the thriller of the summer’

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Customer Reviews

10 Reviews
5 star:
 (8)
4 star:    (0)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.3 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Chilling, intelligent thriller, 24 Mar 2006
This is one of the most impressive thrillers I've read for a long while. Detective Van Hijn is an interesting and original character, and his hunt for a possible serial killer in Amsterdam is well told and very scary in places. However it is the scenes set in the Holocaust that really take you to the dark side and have you horrified one minute and shedding tears the next. Some of the images in this novel stayed with me long after I'd finished reading. I admire authors who manage to combine a well-paced thriller plot with such thought-provoking subject matter - and I'd certainly recommend this novel.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Twisted and gripping, 22 Mar 2006
By A Customer
My god, the previous reviewer must have read a different book! This is one of the most ambitious, dark and successful crime novels I've read in ages. The idea of snuff movies from Auschwitz is almost too horrible to contemplate - but Sherez convinces us that such a thing could have happened and his treatment of the subject is brilliant. Plus, surprisingly, he has a sort of twisted, Larry David-style humour. Very strange, very satisfying.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling, thought-provoking thriller, 21 Jun 2004
This review is from: The Devil's Playground (Hardcover)
I found Devil's Playground to be an engrossing, compelling read from the first page to the last. It's the story of a city (Amsterdam) under the spell of a sadistic serial killer, of the legacy of the Holocaust, of careless words, of the histories we are born into and the violence that surrounds us every day.

The characters are deeply flawed in the best possible way, brimming with humanity and deflected dreams.
Detective Van Hijn is a man apparently caught in a terminal decline, left licking his wounds after gunning down a suspect in the slayings who turned out to be innocent (at least of being the serial killer, but not of being a particularly vicious rapist - such moral ambiguity litters this book); he struggles not to have the case taken from him and being left behind a desk with an ignominious retirement beckoning.
Londoner Jon Reed has fallen to pieces after a stinging record review he wrote caused the artist to kill himself. After years in freefall, a turning point in his life comes when he decides to take in a homeless man from the street, the mysterious Jake, who appears to be harbouring a few secrets of his own with his strange, grotesquely scarred body and his terse manner.
When Jake disappears only to turn up dead a few weeks later in Amsterdam, apparently the latest victim of the serial killer, a path is set that will lead Jon across the channel, to the seemingly limitless hedonism of Amsterdam's red light district, to snuff movies and footage purportedly of the camp at Auschwitz, and to most of all, the truth - not only of what happened to Jake, but also within the shadows of Jon's own past.

So, yeah, there are some big ideas explored here - Does exposure to atrocity help us 'understand' it, or does it desensitise us? What is the proper reaction to violence, to turn away and survive, or protest and die? - But these are never considered at the expense of the story or the characters that lead us through it. Like a skilled surgeon, Sherez exposes the lingering tumours of the Twentieth Century, drawing us in with a fantastically plotted story, rich in detail and atmosphere and hands-down brilliant writing ("We cannot erase our history, like snails we only manage to smear it behind us").

Yet despite all this, Devil's Playground is touched with an unmistakable optimism; characters come to find a (limited) sense of peace in the stray shafts of light that pierce the gloom of their world. In a lovely exchange towards the end of the book, Van Hijn tells Jon after listing a number of places where some small happiness might be found (discovering a rare book cheaply, the taste of fresh pastry, a great song you hadn't expected to hear), "You have to say to yourself, 'It doesn't get any better than this', because if you don't say it at those moments, when are you going to say it? Those are the things that count." After all we've been through by that point in the book, any kind of redemptive light is most welcome, and perhaps most realistically, all we ourselves can expect.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant.
Having read this recently for the fourth time, I was moved to review it.
Sherez's novel is an exceptionally well written thriller, streets ahead of the run of the mill... Read more
Published 4 months ago by AJ

5.0 out of 5 stars Great new talent
Reading this I was taken back to my first encounters with Frederick Forsyth, particularly The Odessa File. For Hamburg read Amsterdam. Read more
Published on 26 Aug 2006 by Mr. M. Bryant

1.0 out of 5 stars AVOID
Started off promising but soon descended into a rambling story with no real suspense and some graphic descriptions of torture suffered by the Jews in WW2 and the porn industry in... Read more
Published on 19 Mar 2006 by A. J. Green

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
you could just imagine in your mind eye, these things happening.
brill read, could'nt put it down.
Published on 15 Aug 2004 by debbie smith

5.0 out of 5 stars An utterly gripping piece of work
This is one of the most gripping books I've come across in years.Once I started reading it I could'nt put it down.That simple. Read more
Published on 12 Aug 2004

2.0 out of 5 stars overblown
Succumbing to the hype and the flap reviews, I bought this book and was very disappointed. It's often very cliched, especially when dealing with the detective, it can be quite... Read more
Published on 9 July 2004

5.0 out of 5 stars A chilling and thought-provoking thriller
I was recommended this novel by a friend and despite the 400 odd pages pretty much read it in one sitting. Read more
Published on 30 Jun 2004 by jennifer

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