The books I read this winter

 Elin Hilderbrand - een weekend aan zee

A celebrity (tv) cook dies, and his 3 (ex)-wives and children must gather for a reunion at the family house in Nantucket for a remembrance gathering.  It brings above all old hatred and conflicts, wounds, personal challenges but also purification of their relationships. 

The book switches back and forth among all the characters. So you get to know all the things why the others hate each other and how they've hurt each other, but also their own vulnerabilities.  The end is slightly predictable but the latter is not disturbing. 

It all also triggered me to research more about Nantucket as a potential vacation destination :). 

David Hewson - De Stenen Engel

The author of The Killing that writes a detective in the city center of Amsterdam and it plays for a big part at the Albert Cuyp market, in the neighbourhood where I've worked for 3 years.  So I was curious to read this. 

It was a good thriller but unconsciously I had to think of Baantjer as well as it was also a lot about internal tensions in the police department etc.  

Maria Peters - De Dirigent

This book really moved me.  The struggled of a woman with talent and a passion in a male world where women don't get chances (yet) but she perseveres and she makes important offers.  
The fact that it is a true story (not in all details...I started googling because I was intrigued), makes it even better. 

Lilian Jackson Braun - De Kat die Sterretjes zag

I was intrigued by a detective. (a journalist in fact) series where the cats would play an important role.  But it was a strange book filled with details of daily village gossip and socializing talk that had nothing to do with the mystery and it ended for me in an anticlimax...as if oh yes the last pages still needed to be used to quickly give away some answers and those cats...they've not done anything special at all in my mind. 
Nope, it is a series but I won't pick the other books anymore from the shelf.