van de Wetering's Hard Rain

 "It was a regular Dutch summer with heavy rain and fog."

There's corruption in the Amsterdam police force!

 

Martin IJsbreker is dead and it's ruled a suicide; a second bullet was spotted but somehow lost in the investigation. Three junkies died of a heroin overdose in a houseboat across the canal from IJsbreker's house on the same day, and those are ruled accidental death. You don't believe any of that, of course.

 

And neither did Grijpstra and de Gier. They go to their boss, the unnamed Commisaris, and he authorizes reopening the case. But soon the Commisaris is facing an investigation for financial misdeeds; Grijpstra and de Gier are nearly killed in an auto accident, and are then suspended because they were purportedly at fault. (The stop sign had been covered up.)

 

There's not actually much mystery. The bad guys corrupting the police force are big time drug runners; their leader is a childhood schoolmate of the Commisaris (and distinctly not a friend). The story is who can be trusted and who not, and how they're going to do down the bad guys. And it's a pretty good one! That's partly because there's more of the Commisaris in this, and I generally find him the most entertaining character in the series. We even learn his first name: Jan.

 

Janwillem van de Wetering wrote fourteen novels and two volumes of stories about the Amsterdam police detectives, and this, from 1986, is the 11th. 

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Silver Age (1986). Body of Water.