Let Them Eat Tulips: Tulip Eaters

The Tulip Eaters opens with every parent’s worst nightmare: their child has been kidnapped. It then turns into every reader’s worst nightmare: plot inconsistencies, poor character development, and plenty of other things to complain about.

In 1980, pediatrician Nora de Jong returned home to Houston to find her mother murdered, her six-month-old baby missing, and the body of an unknown man in the home. De Jong set aside her own grief and trauma and traveled to her parents’ native Netherlands to rescue her children and find the murderer.

The stakes are high and the opening is promising, but Antoinette van Hoogten soon unravels the mystery she has created. In Chapter 4, the author tells the story of the entire violent conflict, and then the book alternates between the killer/kidnapper with strange motives and De Jong’s bumbling detective role.

As the novel progresses, the characters make increasingly perplexing decisions. The police officer who responded to the emergency call returns to flirt with the traumatized mother. De Jong travels to Amsterdam in person to track down the perpetrator of the violence. Her boss keeps threatening to fire her if she doesn’t return to work within two weeks of the tragedy. (Given that the book is set in the United States, this may not be unrealistic.)

The kidnapper changed the baby’s name but then continued to call her by her old name. Somehow, a grown man boarded multiple international flights with a six-month-old baby with no ID and did not arouse suspicion. Of course, the book ends with the baby safely returned to her mother, who refuses to contact police despite an ongoing murder investigation in Texas.

Van Hoogden wrote the book in English, with a little Dutch thrown in for effect. The Dutch words seemed a little stilted and poorly chosen. In one instance, a character refers to a meal Cod It’s like it’s some exotic Dutch fish rather than the widely eaten cod.

The book was published in 2013, then translated into Dutch and published in the Netherlands in 2015. The Dutch publisher chose the more exciting title Hidden Past or Hidden Past to get the translated version.

The thriller is the second book from the lawyer-turned-author. Her first novel, Saving Max, was published in 2010 and was a huge success, selling more than 500,000 copies.

If you’re willing to overlook poor writing for a high-stakes plot, go with The Tulip Eaters from the American Book Center.