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Portrait image of Eliot Pattison Photo: Bill Uhrich/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle/Getty Images (2018)

Sample of authors

Pattison, Eliot

The American author and lawyer, Joseph Eliot Pattison, was born in Philadelphia. He grew up on a farm run by his father; his mother was a bank official. As a child, he devoured books and often disappeared into the forest to read. An aunt who was a librarian in the American army used to supply him with literature from the various countries where she was stationed. Pattison himself says that the...

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Literary figures

Arlette van der Valk

Gender: Female

When she was young, she was called Davidson, but the changed her surname after marrying Detective Superintendent Piet Van der Valk in Amsterdam. She is a temperamental, intelligent master-chef and music lover, a minor character in most of the novels about her husband. When he is murdered, Arlette Van der Valk exposes the perpetrator, and then continues as a private detective to solve cases on...

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