A Conspiracy of Faith

Starred review from March 11, 2013
A cold 14-year-old murder-arson case preoccupies crotchety Copenhagen Deputy Det. Supt. Carl Mørck in bestseller Adler-Olsen’s third Department Q thriller (after 2012’s The Absent One), a shattering parable of honest individuals caught up in the corruption of our times. Mørck must also contend with such problems as an office torn asunder by idiotic governmental asbestos mitigation; the replacement of his assistant Rose by even quirkier Yrsa; his enigmatic Arabic deputy, Assad, gone bonkers; his wayward wife, Vigga, threatening to return; and his paralyzed partner, Hardy, in residence in his living room. To complicate matters further, a mysterious SOS in a bottle puts Mørck on the trail of one of the most cannily conceived serial child-killers imaginable. Mørck faces these heart-wrenchers, small and large, by perceiving them as essentially analogues to everything that Denmark’s welfare state has turned rotten—problems that are all immaterial, Mørck insists, as long as he’s doing his job.

May 15, 2013
Inspector Carl Morck and his raffish colleagues at Copenhagen's Department Q (The Absent One, 2012, etc.) go up against a truly fiendish kidnapper. A few days after he and his brother Tryggve were abducted, Poul Holt managed to scrawl a plea for help in his own blood, deposit it in a bottle and toss it into the sea. Hundreds of miles away, the bottle made landfall and was turned over to Scottish police Sgt. David Bell, who made no attempt to open his discovery. Years passed. Bell died. A computer expert in his station smashed the bottle and immediately contacted Department Q, the perfect venue for the case since "it's old, it's unsolved, and no one else could be bothered." The group's assignment begins with trying to figure out, after all this time, what the message says, who wrote it and when. These tasks are made more difficult since no one reported any children missing at the time and place the message indicates. While Carl and his crew are working feverishly on the dead case, the kidnapper is at work bringing it very much back to life by targeting another pair of children, Magdalena Krogh and her big brother, Samuel. (The reason why he prefers to snatch two victims at a time is the story's most cunning secret, and its most disturbing.) Even after Carl and his Syrian assistant Hafez el-Assad have surmounted the obstacles thrown up by Poul Holt's parents, who insist that he's still alive, they'll have to overcome a much wider conspiracy of silence the kidnapper has been counting on to make accomplices of his victims' families for all these years. Less byplay among the regulars than usual, mainly since whenever promising domestic and group complications arise, Adler-Olsen lets them die on the vine. But the detection and thrills are authentic.

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Starred review from March 15, 2013

Danish crime writer Adler-Olsen delivers a third thriller as inventive and suspenseful as previous novels in the Department Q series (The Keeper of Lost Causes; The Absent One). Det. Carl Morck and his unconventional team investigate cold cases long abandoned by the Copenhagen Police Force. A message in a bottle leads to a decades-old kidnapping that was never reported. Morck soon realizes that not only were several crimes never reported, but the kidnapper is still at it, targeting the families of religious sects that are reluctant to involve the police. Managing the kidnapping investigation, a current arson case, office politics, and his tricky living situation, the wily cop proves he is still up for a challenge. VERDICT Adler-Olsen's cast might seem like stock crime-fiction characters at first glance--the curmudgeonly detective, the flighty secretary, the suspiciously resourceful assistant--but in his hands they are unpredictable and entertaining. This series has enough twists to captivate contemporary mystery readers and enough substance and background to entertain readers with historical and literary tastes. [See Prepub Alert, 11/12/12.]--Catherine Lantz, Morton Coll. Lib., Cicero, IL

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2013
Carl Mrck, the cranky head of Copenhagen's cold-case squad, Department Q, has a knack for catching forgotten cases where lives still hang in the balance. Often the victims are trapped and hidden, as in Adler-Olsen's excellent The Keeper of Lost Causes (2011)but if the author revisits the scenes of his fictional crimes, at least he twists the tales in new and devious ways. Mrck is dealing with the usual headaches at work, including the mysterious idiosyncrasies of his assistants, Assad and Rose, when a message in a bottle lands on his desk. Inside is a plea for help, written in blood. The bad guy here, a kidnapper and killer who targets families belonging to fringe religions, is Adler-Olsen's best yet. The closer Mrck and Assad get to this cunning chameleon with a seemingly endless number of identities and exit plans, the more he eludes their grasp. Series fans may begin to wonder why Mrck doesn't investigate his own assistants as assiduously as he does his cases, but this mix of offbeat departmental politics, puzzling clues, and pulse-pounding pursuit delivers the goods.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)