Danish police detective Carl Mørck is back at work after "sick leave," an innocuous term for what really happened: on a dead-body call, he and two colleagues were gunned down. Mørck is no longer himself, the ace detective who lived and breathed his work; he's argumentative and disruptive, and his fellow officers are fed up.
A plan emerges with a funding mandate from a government official to open a department called Q that will look into "cases deserving special scrutiny." Mørck descends to the new basement office of Q, "the fourth circle of Hell," and decides to do nothing, which is what he wants anyway.
But Mørck discovers that the funding for his department is higher than he was told, so he leverages his information to obtain a car and an assistant. That assistant is Hafez el-Assad, who, with his curiosity, drive to learn and useful copy of Handbook for Crime Technicians, pushes Mørck into reluctant action with one case file: five years earlier, Merete Lyngaard disappeared. A rising political star, she was last seen on a ferry to Germany after she and her brain-damaged younger brother, Uffe, were on a holiday; Uffe was later found wandering in Germany. Did she commit suicide? Did Uffe harm her? Was she kidnapped? There are more questions, but few answers.
Kussi Adler-Olsen has written a Scandinavian thriller without snow and with a leavening wit that is nonetheless dark and chilling and filled with appealing characters. By the book's end, the tension is so high turning the page is difficult, but you'll keep doing so, and happily. Even more happily, Dutton has the next Department Q book, and there are others waiting to be translated. --Marilyn Dahl, book review editor, Shelf Awareness
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