n 1999 van de Wetering published a collection of thirteen short stories featuring Grijpstra and de Gier, written over a sixteen-year period. A Publishers Weekly reviewer expressed disappointment in the stories, finding them to be "koan-like vignettes in which, for the most part, the police solve crimes through intuition rather than by analyzing clues." Allowing that van de Wetering created "witty plots and eccentric characters" in his novels, and that his books on Zen are "quirky and engaging," the reviewer nonetheless concluded that The Amsterdam Cops: Collected Stories is "disappointing." A very different assessment of the same collection is offered by Bill Ott in Booklist. He credited van de Wetering with bridging "the gap between the big-brained European sleuths of the old school." Ott concluded that van de Wetering never fails "to isolate those moments of sheer human oddity that unlock the emotional lives of his characters."