Butterfly on the Storm is the first in the Heartland Trilogy by Dutch author Walter Lucius.
A young boy is found outside Amsterdam, the victim of a hit and run incident, he mutters a couple of words to journalist Farah Hafez who recognises a fellow Afghani refugee which starts a fast paced political crime thriller that spans the Afghan revolution, the Russian invasion, attitudes to refugees, people smuggling and child abuse at the higher levels of society. This is a cracker of a novel, inevitably it will be compared to Larrson’s Millennium Trilogy (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo etc) but I found it more grounded and less dependent on techno miracles. I’m looking forward to reading the next in the series.
4/5