Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Marc Warren, Maimie McCoy, Luke Allen-Gale, Eliot Barnes-Worrell, Darrell D’Silva, Emma Fielding, Robert Boulter, Julia Akkermans, Selin Akkulak, Anil Aras, Paul Bentall, Peter Bolhuis, Thomas Cammaert, Alkan Çöklü, Anita Franklin, Loes Haverkort, Peter van Heeringen, Thom Hoffman, Mike Libanon, Simon Manyonda, Maria Marbus, Hadewych Minis, Liz Snoyink, Leo Staar.
You either love diamonds or you find the fuss over them to be somewhat excruciating. The monopoly of the industry is one that creates its own rules, and everyone just seems to follow them without question, and indeed when the power behind the cartel and advertisers got together and exclaimed almost without a sense of irony that an engagement ring should be valued at the eye-popping price of two months’ salary, then it is no wonder that whilst diamonds may be ‘a girl’s best friend’, they cause division, they cause deception and distrust, and in truth a diamond is hardly a friend, it is a master, one that can control even the hardiest of deniers.
If you want to know how much a diamond will change someone, you just must understand that like any other crafted gem, people will kill for the chance to own it.
Blood in Amsterdam, the second in the latest series of the new styled Van der Valk seeks to answer the fascination, the obsession with the precious gem, and through the drama of a sudden death of the matriarch of The Netherland’s most exclusive, wealthy, and important families, the viewer and the armchair detective alike is taken down the route of insane jealousy, of lives without constraint, and the desirous madness that overcomes them as the family fight over a very unique diamond, one born of blood, that has blood as its own heart.
Amsterdam and diamonds go hand in hand, and yet murder follows both, it seems with ferocious intent, and as Piet van der Valk and his team are confronted with a set of decapitated remains, so the investigation takes a sinister turn as each suspect has their own view on how wealth and privilege is taken not only for granted, but an insistence that only the elite can understand.
Blood in Amsterdam may seem as though it adheres to some of the more obvious tropes of the city, and perhaps The Netherlands as a whole, but underneath it is one that boils away, one that unleashes the evil of how humanity is taken in by sparkling objects, that at the centre of our souls is a hardened piece of predetermined worth and one only reflects light, never one to produce its own.
“If an evil spirit had to hide from God, it would hide in a diamond”, but then evil needs no such hiding place in which to destroy good people.
Ian D. Hall