It is the case of Merete Lynggaard, a politician who vanished some five years earlier without a trace from a ferry. Armed with a stack of folders of Copenhagen’s cold cases and a supposedly Syrian refugee for company named Assad, hired to clean and keep things tidy, he does as little as possible until one of the cases catches his eye. He’s okay with that, he can find ways to make his situation work for him. Carl is surprised to find that it’s a department of one, tucked down into the basement and he quickly assesses that this new “Department Q” has been set up to secure much funding, most of which Carl isn’t seeing.

When Carl returns to work, he isn’t sure what to expect, but promotion wasn’t it.Ĭarl finds himself as the new head of Department Q, a special investigation unit that was set up to re-open old cases that had particular public interest. One was killed, the second paralysed for life with very little chance of a recovery. Carl was shot in the temple but the other two detectives, both from his team fared worse than that. (Aug.Jussi Adler-Olsen (translated from the Danish by Lisa Hartford)Ĭarl Mørck used to be one of Copenhagen’s best homicide detectives until what should’ve been a routine homicide scene mapping turned tragedy. The pages fly by as the twisty puzzle unfolds. While the purpose of the assignment is to get the difficult detective out of the way, Morck, who's initially content just to kill time, finds himself revitalized by a once high-profile mystery%E2%80%94the 2002 disappearance of a prominent and attractive female politician, Merete Lynggaard. When Morck finally returns to work, friction with his colleagues leads his boss to transfer him to head a new unit, Department Q, tasked with resolving 'cases deserving special scrutiny' from across the country. Morck is shot in the head, but one of his brother officers is killed, and the other left paralyzed and suicidal. In 2007, Copenhagen homicide detective Carl Morck narrowly cheats death when he and two colleagues are ambushed while checking out a crime scene. debut with the superlative first in his Department Q series. Adler-Olsen, Denmark's leading crime writer, makes his U.S.

The keeper of lost causes novel