The Vanished

July 4, 2016
At the start of the Hammers’ entertaining if meandering third Konrad Simonsen thriller (after 2015’s The Girl from the Ice), a 16-year-old boy takes a submachine gun to his Copenhagen school and opens fire. This horrible crime is but the preamble to a low-profile case, the death of middle-aged postal worker Jørgen Kramer Nielsen, to which Simonson, a detective superintendent, is assigned. Did Nielsen fall to his death down a flight of stairs—or was he pushed? This routine inquiry slowly grows into something more serious as Simonsen and his team members painstakingly connect Nielsen and a group of the dead man’s high school friends to the fate of a British woman missing for decades. Glimpses into Simonsen’s first years on the force during the late 1960s and early 1970s lend interest, but readers should be prepared for an excess of details and asides along the way to the satisfying ending. The Hammers are a sister-brother writing team. Agent: Sofie Voller, Gyldendal (Denmark).

June 15, 2016

When DI Konrad Simonsen returns to work after a heart attack, he is assigned the task of investigating the death of postal worker Jorgensen Nielsen. While it is assumed that his death was caused by an accidental fall, not all of the evidence matches up. The case takes a turn when photos of a long-missing girl show up in Nielsen's loft. What follows is an overly complicated and meandering investigation that takes Simonsen and his team on a hunt for answers in the unrest of the 1960s and includes high school misfits, runaways, a psychic, priests, and hippies. Throughout the investigation, Simonsen remembers his own time as a young police officer and his tumultuous relationship with a girlfriend whose involvement in leftist movements ultimately tore them apart. These forays into his past only add confusion to an already muddled plot. The Hammer siblings (The Hanging; The Girl in the Ice) have fallen short of their apparent goal of an intricately plotted tale, having written instead a novel with too many competing threads, not all of which are effectively connected. VERDICT Fans of Nordic noir will easily find more satisfactory offerings in the crowded field such as the "Department Q" novels by Jussi Adler-Olsen.--Portia Kapraun, Delphi P.L., IN

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 15, 2016
Scandinavian noir crime fiction continues to pile up the body count in this latest by the Danish Hammer siblings.In Copenhagen, Detective Superintendent Konrad Simonsen has returned to his position as head of the Homicide Squad after time off for a massive heart attack. He's mending nicely but miffed: in his absence, second-in-command Arne Pedersen has taken over, and Simonsen's on limited duty. But his first day back, a school shooting involving a boy who kills two teachers with a submachine gun and holds his classmates hostage has the Homicide Squad out trying to diffuse the situation. And that's not all: Simonsen is also asked to look into the death of a man who was found at the bottom of his own staircase six months earlier. Although initially ruled as an accident, someone higher up wants it confirmed, and, for Simonsen, the case means a walk through the tumultuous 1960s, when the elderly detective was a young police officer. Meanwhile, the two cases improbably link up, Simonsen decides to smoke marijuana for the first time in his life, and the book wanders from clue to clue like a drunk stumbling along a sidewalk hoping each doorknob he turns will be his own. Overly long and complicated, with plot twists that lead absolutely nowhere, this novel appears to be an excuse to take Simonsen on a nostalgic trip back to his younger days of policing. Simonsen's investigators turn over every rock in their painstaking but often dull examination of both evidence and circumstance, and the authors never fail to describe, in detail, every move the police make, even the ones that ultimately mean nothing. With stilted writing that could charitably be partially attributed to the translation and at least one prominent error relating to the submachine gun, this story's a massive snoozer.Ridiculous coincidence aside, this Danish sleeping pill proves thin on story.

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June 1, 2016
In the third installment of Denmark's popular Konrad Simonsen series (after The Girl in the Ice, 2015), Simonsen returns to partial duty as Copenhagen's head of homicide while recovering from a heart attack. Pauline Berg, a detective on his tight-knit team, is also struggling with the aftermath of her recent kidnapping by a serial killer, and Simonsen partners with her as a move toward reunifying the group. Jrgen Nielsen was found with his neck broken at the foot of his stairs, and accident reconstruction indicates murder. In Nielsen's attic, Simonsen finds a shrine to an unidentified girl, and Nielsen's photos link a high-school retreat he attended to a missing girl caught up in the hippie movement that swept Europe in the 1960s. As Simonsen peels back the years since the girl's disappearance, he's surprised to feel nostalgic toward Rita, the first love he lost to 1970s radical politics. A deftly written procedural with clear appeal for fans of Scandinavian crime fiction, particularly those who delight in riveting investigative detail and psychological intricacies.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)