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Summary
Summary
Jussi Adler-Olsen's Department Q series, with more than fourteen million copies sold worldwide, continues with the most chilling cold case yet.
In 1987, Nete Hermansen plans revenge on those who abused her in her youth, including Curt Wad, a charismatic surgeon who was part of a movement to sterilize wayward girls in 1950s Denmark.
More than twenty years later, Detective Carl Mørck already has plenty on his mind when he is presented with the case of a brothel owner, a woman named Rita, who went missing in the eighties: New evidence has emerged in the case that destroyed the lives of his two partners--the case that sent Carl to Department Q.
But when Carl's assistants, Assad and Rose, learn that numerous other people disappeared around the same weekend as Rita, Carl takes notice. As they sift through the disappearances, they get closer and closer to Curt Wad, who is more determined than ever to see the vision of his youth take hold and whose brutal treatment of Nete and others like her is only one small part of his capacity for evil.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the fourth entry in Adler-Olsen's Department Q series, brilliant but hapless head detective Carl Morck and his assistants-the feisty, demanding Rose and the devious Assad-are faced with a multiple-murder cold case dating back to the 1950s. That's when Curt Wad, a closet fascist, performed secret involuntary abortions and sterilizations on "the unfit." Surprisingly, Adler-Olsen manages to mix humor into a novel with such a dark back-story. Chief among the amusements are the extended effects a flu virus has on the department, which the author presents in painfully funny detail, and Morck's continuous victimization at the hands of his degenerate cousin. Both are enhanced by narrator Malcolm who treats a description of a bright red, leaky nose with the same crisp approach he might use for a Shakespearean sonnet. Malcolm presents the perennially sighing Morck with a voice that fluctuates from despairing to wistful to cautiously hopeful, marked by swiftly dissipating moments of elation. There's a tinge of amusement in Rose's shrill and angry commands. And the virus-infected Assad speaks with a subdued voice that's filtered through a stuffy nose. Malcolm is just as effective in rendering the novel's more serious sections, capturing the smarmy unction and unbridled evil of Wad. A Dutton hardcover. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
When your series relies on cold cases, it's not always easy to craft plots that have both historical interest and an air of urgency, but it's something Adler-Olsen is very good at even if he's getting just a little bit less successful with each successive book. The fourth Department Q novel finds cranky Copenhagen detective Carl Morck and his quirky but competent assistants, Assad and Rose, puzzling over a seemingly unconnected group of people who all went missing at the same time. We learn the perpetrator and her motive early on; the tension comes from Morck's missteps and the dangers he's blind to. And while this labyrinthine revenge plot encompasses everything from eugenics and right-wing politics to Morck's rocky love life, and includes a nifty twist at the end, the seams are starting to show. Police procedure is an afterthought, repercussions almost nonexistent, and the mystery of Assad's secret life has dragged on too long without meaningful development. Still good reading, but Adler-Olsen needs to tighten it up a little.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
JOHN REBUS is the kind of cop who isn't afraid to think, and what he's thinking in Ian Rankin's terrific new procedural, SAINTS OF THE SHADOW BIBLE (Little, Brown, $26), is that he and his ilk aren't long for this brave new world. Having decided that retirement wasn't such a hot idea after all, the Edinburgh homicide detective is back on the job, but feeling increasingly out of step with his younger, more tech-savvy and ethics-bound colleagues. "My town, my rules" was the mantra adopted by Rebus and those old cronies (the self-anointed "saints" of the title) who held themselves above the regulations governing the behavior of lesser cops. But that boast rings hollow when Internal Affairs opens an investigation into a 30-year-old case of dubious probity. Complications arise, as they always do in Rankin's painstakingly constructed plots, linking the old case with a suspicious auto accident involving the offspring of a high-profile politician and a crooked businessman. (The mothers don't count for much here, as women rarely do in this series.) In one surprisingly bold move, Rankin has shifted Malcolm Fox, Rebus's perennial nemesis and current Internal Affairs shadow, into a closer relationship - something dangerously akin to friendship - with his old enemy. "The whole system's changed, hasn't it?" Fox says, in one of their more intimate exchanges about the capricious nature of police work and those slippery definitions of right and wrong. Rebus doesn't really need the reminders. His apartment décor of cigarette butts, beer bottles, print newspapers and LPs of Miles Davis ("from the period before he got weird") might tag him as a candidate for the tar pits where dinosaurs from the 1980s go to die. But confronting the man he used to be has left him with a comforting insight - young dinosaurs are being born every day. MARTHA GRIMES HAS a dangerous sense of humor. She cracked it like a whip in "Foul Matter," her 2003 takedown of the publishing industry. The satire is even more barbed in this sequel, THE WAY OF ALL FISH (Scribner, $26.99), which brings back the best (that is to say, the worst) of those ruthless publishers, unprincipled agents, devious lawyers and difficult authors who make the book business so ripe for parody. The novel's imperiled heroine is Cindy Sella, a respected but naive novelist embroiled in a costly lawsuit with her unscrupulous former agent, L. Bass Hess, and his evil henchmen in the law firm of Snelling, Snelling, Borax and Snelling. Cindy sets the amusingly absurd plot in motion by leading the rescue of a tank of exotic fish in the Clownfish Cafe, thereby endearing herself to fellow diners Candy (who admires all creatures aquatic) and Karl (who feels the same way about books). These lovable contract killers, first met in "Foul Matter," plan to save Cindy from her dastardly ex-agent through an elaborate scheme of byzantine design, hilariously executed by a huge cast of Dickensian characters. The tone may be light - "How noir is this?" Karl complains of one gentrified setting. "Where's your fog? Your foghorns? Your miasma?" - but Grimes's notion of farce is positively lethal. THERE'S TOO MUCH sentimental gush and not enough guts and gore in THE DEVIL'S BREATH (Kensington, paper, $15), the latest entry in Tessa Harris's uneven but fascinating series featuring Dr. Thomas Silkstone, an American anatomist struggling to pursue his mystifying profession of forensic science in the imperfectly enlightened society of 18th-century England. Harris is at her vivid best describing in precise, fearsome detail the "Great Fogg," the clouds of noxious poison gas that swept across Europe in 1783, darkening the sky, destroying crops and snatching the breath of men, women and children. Dashing between his London laboratory and his ladylove's country estate, Thomas works feverishly to determine the cause of this airborne plague and find a cure. The ignorance and superstition of the age hamper his work, but so does the robotic behavior of the stock characters around him. As if to compensate, Harris offers revoltingly graphic glimpses of London, where erudite men think deep thoughts but have yet to discover the benefits of sanitation. THE DANISH AUTHOR Jussi Adler-Olsen revisits his favorite topics of captivity and torture in THE PURITY OF VENGEANCE (Dutton, $26.95), a sordid tale of "unwanted pregnancy, abortion, rape, unjust confinement to mental asylums and compulsory sterilization" inspired by actual events during a dark period of Danish history. Ah, but there's more, so much more in this frenzied thriller: homicide by poison, scalpel and hammer, multiple nail-gun murders, a sulfuric acid attack, displays of putrefying body parts and the splendid Grand Guignol spectacle of a dinner party (complete with place cards) for five (or is it six?) corpses. Carl Morck, the homicide cop charged with making sense of all this gaudy material, is a bit of a joker himself. More a bad-tempered grouch than a brooding hero in the classic Scandinavian mode, he presides over Department Q, an eccentric cold case unit staffed with personnel rejects and relegated to the basement of Copenhagen's police headquarters. It's a strange world down below and not to be taken too seriously; but still, there's never a dull moment in the cellar.
Kirkus Review
Another cold case for the sturdy misfits of Copenhagen's Department Q, together with two more incomplete blasts from the past for Detective Carl Mrck. Except for the prostitute who reported her missing, no one much cared when brothel keeper Rita Nielsen vanished back in 1987, and it's no wonder the case languished. Now, however, the mystery assumes new urgency with the news that she wasn't the only one to disappear. The very same day, attorney Philip Nrvig, fisherman Viggo Mogensen, womens asylum guard Gitte Charles and do-nothing Tage Hermansen also went AWOL. Furthermore--though it takes Carl, his assistant, Hafez el-Assad, and his secretary, Rose Knudsen, quite a while to work this out--they all had links to Tage's cousin Nete Hermansen, long immured in a Sprog home for fallen women, whose second chance at a respectable life was dashed when Dr. Curt Wad, a stalwart of the Purity Party, confronted her and her businessman husband publicly with some sordid details of her past. Adler-Olsen (A Conspiracy of Faith, 2012, etc.) cuts back and forth between the fatal day in 1987 when Nete decided to avenge herself on the people who had ruined her life and the present day, when Carl's investigation of both Nete and Wad is complicated by rumors that Carl helped his cousin Ronny kill Ronny's father many years ago and further hints of the horrific fatality that first sent Carl to Department Q. Fans can rest assured that neither of these lesser subplots comes anywhere near closure. Another accomplished exercise in three-decker suspense, though the climactic twist would be harder to predict if the story had ended 100 pages earlier.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The latest entry in Adler-Olsen's series (after A Conspiracy of Faith) does not disappoint. Set in Denmark, the novel moves in time among the 1950s, 1987, and the present, drawing readers in and concluding with a tense, suspenseful, edge-of-your-seat ending. Brilliant, brooding Det. Carl Morck once more commands his assistants Assad and Rose on a case that exposes the brutal treatment of a young woman, Nete Hermansen, in the 1950s and numerous people who disappeared as a result of her quest for vengeance. A stark portrayal of the danger of mixing politics with morality, the horrific tale is mitigated by Adler-Olsen's ability to use humor in the most unexpected places. The series takes listeners into dark areas of the government, our daily lives, our work, and our innermost selves. Narrator Graeme Malcolm is excellent. VERDICT Recommend to fans of Jo Nesbo, Karin Fossum, and Camilla Lackberg. ["An uneasy mix of comedy (far too much of it bathroom humor) and suspense," read the review of the Dutton hc, LJ 11/1/13.]-Sandra C. Clariday, Tennessee Wesleyan Coll., Athens (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.