"To sin or not to have sinned, that is the question" raised by the head of Amsterdam's Murder Brigade in this 13th installment of the series by Janwillem van de Wetering. A Buddhist mystic, the Murder Brigade leader is off to New York with an underling, the nihilist Sergeant de Gier, to solve the murder of a countryman who dies under horrible conditions in Central Park. Like its 12 predecessors, this is a Zen mystery, and simple questions of guilt and innocence sometimes take a back seat to deeper philosophical musings.