Book Review: The Absent One by Jussi Adler-Olsen

The Absent One by Jussi Adler-Olsen is the second in the Danish “Department Q” cold case mystery series (available August 21, 2012).

 



Detective Carl Mørck is satisfied with the notion of
picking up long-cold leads as head of Department Q, Denmark’s cold case
squad. So he’s naturally intrigued when a closed case lands on his desk:
A brother and sister were brutally murdered two decades earlier, and
one of the suspects -part of a group of privileged boarding-school
students- confessed and was convicted.





The question at first, of course, is who was it that placed the case
file on his desk, and then the why follows. But do these questions
really matter? The case is closed, so why bother? Unless, and that’s
exactly when things start to get interesting, there was more than one
 man involved in the case, and the man who took the blame was paid to do
so.





Mørck, truth be told, is not so eager to investigate this case. Not too
long ago he found himself in the epicenter of a painful investigation
that brought his Department Q some fame, and just before that he was
involved in an incident during which one of his partners was killed,
while another one came out of the ordeal almost completely paralyzed. He
carries, one would dare say, a lot of dead weight on his shoulders, and
what he doesn’t really need right now is add to it by working on a case
like this.



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