The Dinner Club

The story reads like Amsterdam itself: different, trendy, tolerant and a little bit crazy. Desperate Houswifes meet Fatal Attraction. If you want to read an American thriller, you should not read this book, if you want to read something different but maybe even better, you should defenitely give it a try!

After Karen moved into the village from Amsterdam with her husband, Michel, and their two daughters, it took her a while to make friends. But finally she found Hanneke, and through her three other woman, and the five of them became fast friends. They dubbed themselves "The Dinner Club" and became a mutual support group--they drank and ate and vacationed together, watched one another's kids. Their husbands did business together. But when the book opens one of their houses is on fire. Someone dies. And the tragedy, together with another which follows shortly afterward, lays bare various truths, among them that the relationships among the members of the Club are more superficial than Karen had supposed. Nor were the members' five marriages as happy as she had supposed. Saskia Noort's The Dinner Club follows the downward trajectory of the Club's relationships. As things disintegrate, Karen comes increasingly to suspect that the fire was fueled by something more than middle-aged angst and alcohol. The book is filled with a quiet menace, and Noort does a great job of keeping us guessing, our suspicions alighting now on one character, now another. After this slow, steady build-up of tension the book's conclusion, an explosion of violence, is jarring. It doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the book. The conclusion also left me thinking I might have to re-read some chapters to figure out what, precisely, was the truth behind the complex of relationships among the five Dinner Club members and their husbands. The Dinner Club, which was originally pubished in Dutch in 2004, has been a best-seller in the Netherlands, and film rights to the book have been sold. It would, I think, translate well to the screen.

The inferno destroyed the villa killing wealthy Evert Struyck; his wife Babette was injured but their two children, Luuk and Beau, managed to escape. Babette's four female friends (Karen van de Made, Patricia Vogel, Hanneke Lemstra and Angela Bijlsma) who make up along with her the female part of "the dinner club" couples, try to help the distraught woman. Adding to the shock is that the police found Evert's "farewell" note in his car asking the others for forgiveness leading to the police to conclude suicide. However, not long afterward Hanneke falls from a hotel balcony. Unable to ignore what is happening to her friends and fearing her family is next, Karen begins to piece together the motive behind the two deaths as she begins to understand that The Dinner Club and its male spousal equivalent are tied not by friendship and caring, but by crime and adultery. The tale starts off as an extended family drama in which the audience sees how each of the surviving seven members of the Dinner Club and their offspring cope with the first death of one of them though that look is mostly filtered by Karen. Half way into the story, when Karen calls to speak to Hanneke, but instead gets an Amsterdam cop the story line turns into an amateur sleuth mystery. Thus the audience will know the key players at least through the Karen sieve before the thriller kicks into first gear. Well written but somewhat slow at first, this is a fine Dutch mystery. Harriet Klausner