April 1, 2022
Why is Department Q, the cold cases division of the Copenhagen police, investigating a current suicide? Because Det. Carl M�rck's superior is convinced that there's a connection to a mysterious death dating to 1988, and the initially skeptical Qers soon find echoes in a string of odd deaths since then. The penultimate title in the "Department Q" series from Barry and Glass Key winner Adler-Olsen.
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Starred review from July 18, 2022
Opening teases don’t get much more tantalizing than in bestseller Adler-Olsen’s stellar ninth Department Q novel featuring Copenhagen’s cold-case division (after 2020’s Victim 2117). In 1982, six college students are killed by a bolt of lightning; an injured woman tells a first responder, with a creepy smile, that her survival means that she can survive anything, “with God’s help.” In 1988, when Maja Petersen goes to retrieve her car from an auto shop, along with her three-year-old son, the garage explodes, killing the child along with five men. In 2020, homicide chief Marcus Jacobsen asks his best investigator, Carl Mørck, to revisit the explosion after Maja dies by suicide. Both men were on the scene at the time, and Jacobsen has always felt there were some unresolved questions about the explosion. Those suspicions have been revived by the suicide and Jacobsen’s noting an anomaly in the official reports that he’d previously missed: someone, for some reason, left a three-inch pile of kitchen salt near the entrance to the garage. Their digging reveals other cases where such a pile was left. The climax lives up to the promise of the brilliant opening, cleverly connecting all the plotlines. Christopher Fowler fans will be riveted.
August 15, 2022
Department Q, the cold case division of the Copenhagen Police, races to prevent the latest in a series of vigilante killings of seriously bad people. Have you ever watched your fellow citizens casually flout laws designed for the common good and wished you could take revenge? Someone's assembled a crack team of female avengers whose mission is to execute "due diligence" on your behalf. Reading about the recent suicide of Maja Petersen reminds Chief of Homicide Marcus Jacobsen of the 1988 explosion that leveled Ove Wilder's Auto, a repair shop that routinely cheated its unwitting clients, and killed Maja's son, Max--not to mention the owner and three employees who were discovered inside. The body count may seem high, but it's only the beginning, for news that a sharp-eyed technician spotted a pile of table salt outside the shop's entrance gate all those years ago moves Chief Inspector Carl M�rck to ask Rose Knudsen to search the records for other salt-seasoned killings no one has thought to link together, and his team ultimately unearths a total of 16 candidates, one every other year, each of them perpetrated on the birthday of a notorious dictator. As the anniversary of Mao Zedong's birth looms on Dec. 26, the members of Department Q struggle to identify not only potential suspects, but potential victims, unaware that exploitative reality TV show producer Maurits van Bierbek has already been kidnapped and hidden in a secret lair in preparation for the big day. Just to make matters more interesting, newly discovered evidence suddenly implicates Carl in a 15-year-old drug case, and Jacobsen himself leads the charge for his arrest. Proof that there are indeed tsunamis in Denmark.
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Starred review from September 15, 2022
As Copenhagen battles a surge of COVID-19 cases, Carl M�rck and the Copenhagen police's cold-case squad, Department Q (introduced in The Keeper of Lost Causes, 2007) uncover a strange clue that connects dozens of old death investigations. Every two years for decades, an unexplained pile of table salt has been found at the death scenes of people accused of predatory behavior. While the team digs for the killer's motive, COVID shutdowns require them to take on fresh cases, and their investigation of a vigilante's murder reveals a journal documenting a cult zealously bent on punishing immorality. Instinctively, the team is drawn toward the possible connection to the serial cases, but are they chasing a red herring? As they connect the dots, their killer kidnaps a reality TV tycoon, and the race is on to stop the next execution. Adler-Olsen deftly applies story-propelling pressure to the investigation: while their killer is counting down to the next kill, shutdowns restrict the team's movement and resources, and M�rck is implicated in a drug-trafficking case he thought he'd left in the past. This nail-biter offers the best of everything Department Q thrillers promise: compelling team rapport, boots-on-the-ground detection, masterful story construction, and a cliffhanger ending. Readers reluctant to depart gritty Copenhagen should also check out Sara Blaedel's procedurals
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