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Portrait image of Dorothy Salisbury Davis Photo: Mathew Peyton / Getty Images Entertainment (2003)

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Davis, Dorothy Salisbury

The American crime writer Dorothy Salisbury Davis was born in Chicago, Illinois, and adopted by an older childless couple, the Salisburys, who ran their own farm in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. She had no idea that she was adopted until she found her birth certificate at the age of 17. It was only when she was well into middle age that she attempted to track down her biological parents and discovered...

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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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