Shoreline - Dave Rigby

Harry Vos, a retired man in his 60's and a part-time private investigator, is on holiday on the Belgian coast. When he takes an early morning stroll along the local beach he and a woman walking her dog are shocked to discover a body washed up on the shore. Unable to get a signal on his phone Harry hurries to a bar on the other side of the sand dunes, to call the police. By the time he returns to the beach, he finds the body, the woman and the dog have all disappeared.
When the police arrive, they suspect he is a time-waster and take him in for questioning. They refuse to believe his story about a body, but he is finally released and returns to the beach to try and work out what happened. Half-buried in the sand he finds an amulet with an inscription in a foreign language. Knowing the police will not be investigating, he decides to take on the case as a personal mission. Using the amulet as his starting point, he aims to find out who the man is, how he died and how he came to be on the beach
The case takes him into the murky and dangerous world of people-smuggling. Working with Katerine, an academic who specialises in West African artefacts and members of the Congolese community in Brussels, he begins to find some answers to his questions, but all the time he is moving closer and closer to danger. This comes to a head in his confrontations with Rodenbach, a smuggler and the sinister Hendrickx.