Hey, thanks for stopping by! I’m not exactly sure how Dru Ann heard about me and my adventures in The Netherlands, but she invited me to tell you about myself, and I’m egotistical enough to think there’s a chance you might even be interested—so here goes!

My name is Jack Farmer. “Jack” is usually short for John or Jackson, but in my case it’s my actual first name. My father’s father died when my dad was just a kid, and he grew up determined to name his first-born son James in his father’s honor. But then my mother’s father Rick died a month before I was born, so she wanted to call me Richard in his honor. They couldn’t decide whether to name me James Richard or Richard James, and Farmer family legend suggests that they almost wound up getting a divorce over the issue—until they finally came up with the compromise of taking the JA from the beginning of Grampa James’ name and the CK from the end of Grampa Rick’s, making me plain old ordinary Jack.

Anyway, that’s probably besides the point.

The point is that at the end of my first year of grad school at the University of Michigan, one of my professors offered to pay me to spend two weeks doing historical research for him in the archives of a place called the Begijnhof in Amsterdam. I didn’t have any other plans for the summer, and the only time I’d ever been out of the country before was the night I crossed the Detroit River into Windsor, Canada, to see Gaelic Storm at the Colosseum at Caesars.

So I jumped at Professor Harriman’s offer, and before I knew it I was on my way to Europe! He’d booked me a room at a pleasant hotel, but when I checked in with Gerrit Rombach, who was the head honcho at the Begijnhof, a small community of elderly women in the heart of the city, it turned out he was on his way up to a conference in the north of Holland—and he offered to let me stay in his little bedroom upstairs at the Houten Huys, the Wooden House, which serves as a sort of headquarters-slash-information-center for the community. That meant I could pocket the cost of my hotel in addition to the pittance Prof Harriman was paying me, so of course I said sure.

I went back to the hotel to fetch my backpack and check out, and settled in with Dropje, Mr. Rombach’s black cat. Like I said, most of the residents of the Begijnhof are old ladies, but there was also a kindly British reverend, a crabby handyman, and a drop-dead-gorgeous young nurse named Jet.

Little did I know when I agreed to spend part of my summer in The Netherlands and to move into the Begijnhof that what I would find there was romance … and murder!

Dutch Threat
Genre: Traditional Mystery
Release: September 2023
Format: Print (Sept. 2023), Digital (Nov. 2023)
Purchase Link

Summertime in Amsterdam can be murder

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy. But when one of his professors offers to send American grad student Jack Farmer to Europe to do historical research in Amsterdam’s Begijnhof—a peaceful closed community in the heart of the bustling Dutch capital—Jack looks forward to a summer of mostly play and not much work. Then he meets Jet Schilders, an attractive young nurse who takes care of the elderly woman next door, and realizes that his summer in The Netherlands might just turn out to be even more fun than he’d hoped.

When the woman next door is brutally murdered, though, and her nurse turns out to be the prime suspect, Jack and Jet join forces in an attempt to find the real killer and clear her name. But their investigation puts them in Dutch with the local police, and a second murder raises the stakes … and paints a target on both of their backs.

Meet the author
Josh Pachter is the author of more than a hundred short crime stories, which have been appearing in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and other places since 1968. He also translates crime fiction from Dutch to English and edits anthologies, most recently Happiness Is a Warm Gun: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Beatles (Down and Out Books), which includes Dru Ann’s first published fiction, a collaboration with fellow blogger Kristopher Zgorski of BOLO Books. In 2020, the Short Mystery Fiction Society awarded Josh its Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement. Dutch Threat is his first novel.