Photo: Maggie Hardie/REX / TT (2004)
Sample of authors
Melo, Patrícia
The Brazilian dramaturge, journalist and author Patrícia Melo is an internationally renowned member of a generation of urban authors that emerged in Brazil in the 1990s. Her crime novels, informed by sex and violence and set in the favelas, Brazil’s urban slums, are especially acclaimed. She researches her stories by interviewing prison inmates and people who live in the slums.
Melo was born in A...
Literary figures
Piet van der Valk
Gender: Male
An independent, eccentric and short-tempered detective superintendent with the police in Amsterdam, the main character in a suite of police novels by Englishman Nicolas Freeling. Piet van der Valk is arrogant, but also critical of society and empathetic. He is married to Arlette with whom he has two sons and an adopted daughter. He is killed during an investigation, and his wife takes over the...