Ben de Raaf

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Ben de Raaf was born in 1961 in Rotterdam. In 1979, De Raaf started working with the surveillance service of the Rotterdam-Rijnmond police, and from 1990 to 1999, he was a community police officer in the Rotterdam neighborhood of Het Lage Land. In 1999, he published his first book, On Patrol, under the pseudonym 'Herman Dad'. He also returned to work with the surveillance service until 2002. Since 2002, he has been working as a sergeant in the Rotterdam-Rijnmond dispatch center.

His stories are fictional, but the settings are real. His books also contain a Christian message: for the main characters, attending church is normal. The books are set in Capelle aan den IJssel, Krimpen aan den IJssel, and the Rotterdam districts of Kralingen-Crooswijk and Prins Alexander.

In 2018, De Raaf announced he would stop writing children's books. In the same year, Woman Missing in Schiebroek, his last book, was published. De Raaf has written 50 books with a total circulation of more than 150,000 copies.