Bribery

Job and Gaby van Emmerik live in a beautiful house in Haarlem with their two teenage children and an old dog. Job has lost his job as city architect when he was about to expose a fraud affair in local politics. He spends his days walking the dog in the Haarlemmerhout, much to the displeasure of Gaby, who is burdened by financial worries that Job pays little attention to.
A year after Jobs' dismissal, an old acquaintance from Eastern Europe suddenly turns up, a woman who could destroy Jobs' life even more, but who forms a close friendship with Gaby. She also provides the family with generous financial aid. When the woman increasingly strangles him with devious intrigues, Job realizes that he will have to find a way to make her disappear from his life - if necessary, outside the law.
Smeergeld is a brilliant, exceptionally exciting morality novel by a gifted writer, about the choices we would rather not make in life. An irresistible page-turner about love and infidelity, sincerity and corruption, marriage and parenthood - against the backdrop of a major personal and social crisis.
Nausicaa Marbe (Bucharest, 1963) became famous overnight in 1998 with her novel Mândraga, for which she received the Charlotte Köhler Scholarship. Over the years she developed into one of the most talked-about columnists in the Netherlands, initially for de Volkskrant, now for De Telegraaf. With Smeergeld she definitively returns to her great love, the novel.