The Keeper of Lost Causes (Department Q, #1) in Crazy Challenge Connection

Nov 29, 2011 Anne (Booklady) Molinarolo rated it it was amazing

Shelves: winter-2011-12, thriller-mystery, thriller-suspense, good-fiction, permanent-library

The Danish premier crime writer has thankfully come to the United States. And I am grateful; I love “finding” new authors, especially authors who write series. Reminiscent of Stieg Larsson’s The Millennium Series, Jussi Adler-Olsen’s novel starts off with a bang and the action never stops until the end! All readers get ready for a sleepless night to finish THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES for it is a chilling tale of both redemption and revenge.

Detective Carl Morck has returned to the Copenhagen Polic The Danish premier crime writer has thankfully come to the United States. And I am grateful; I love “finding” new authors, especially authors who write series. Reminiscent of Stieg Larsson’s The Millennium Series, Jussi Adler-Olsen’s novel starts off with a bang and the action never stops until the end! All readers get ready for a sleepless night to finish THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES for it is a chilling tale of both redemption and revenge.

Detective Carl Morck has returned to the Copenhagen Police Department after an extended sick leave after an incident that has left one of his team members dead and another in the hospital paralyzed from the shoulders down. Suffering from survivor’s guilt and PTSD, Carl is still as “lazy, surly, morose, always bitching, and constantly treating his colleagues like crap." And that is on a good day. His boss figures just the spot to put the morose Morck – the basement as the head of a new department. Department Q is to be a cold case department with Carl as its only employee. But when Morck discovers that the police department will gain millions of kroner because of Q, he demands that the basement be cleaned and furnished, a departmental car, and assistant to give the 40 or so cases the proper scrutiny that they need as stated in the funding mandate.

Much to Morck’s chagrin, his new assistant Hafez el Assad is good at cleaning, bad at making coffee, and too interested in the Department cases. Do we really believe the good natured jack-of-all trades is the former dictator of Syria? Neither does Carl, but the Syrian is intelligent and has a good investigative eye. So much that Assad won’t let Carl sit smoking cigarettes and playing computer spider solitare, and soon our ‘hero’ becomes interested in the first official case of his department. And it does need scrutiny, because his colleague Bak and the other members of the Rapid Response Team botched the investigation of the beautiful up-coming politician, Merete Lynggaard. She is still very much alive kept in an atmosphere chamber since she disappeared without a trace in 2002. But it may be too late for her if Morck and Assad don’t work quickly to save her from an ultimate gruesome revenge.

The chapters of Merete’s captivity were a bit hard too read, but her strength and resolve to live and exact her own revenge upon her captors shined. Adler-Olsen’s treatment of the disabled Uffe Lynggaard was beautifully written. I enjoyed the modern treatment of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in the persona of Morck and Assad and cannot wait to read the next installment of Department Q that is supposedly coming out sometime in 2012.
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Dec 25, 2018 Sam rated it really liked it

Shelves: borrowed-books, books-of-2018

Really more of a 3.5 star read rounded to a 4.

I love Nordic crime fiction, and this novel came highly recommended by a few bookish friends. I went in with high expectations, and for the most part, the novel met them. However, the book is not without its faults.

I LOVED the mystery at the centre of the novel. Marete's disappearance is a truly fascinating and unique crime, and I was completely riveted to the novel as her story unfolded. Carl is a reasonably interesting protagonist, if not entirel Really more of a 3.5 star read rounded to a 4.

I love Nordic crime fiction, and this novel came highly recommended by a few bookish friends. I went in with high expectations, and for the most part, the novel met them. However, the book is not without its faults.

I LOVED the mystery at the centre of the novel. Marete's disappearance is a truly fascinating and unique crime, and I was completely riveted to the novel as her story unfolded. Carl is a reasonably interesting protagonist, if not entirely likable, but I felt like I needed more background on him to really care. There's a bit of info sprinkled into the novel about his past and the incident that killed one of his partners and paralyzed the other, but it was very piecemeal. I can forgive this a little bit knowing that this is the first in a series and more will likely be revealed in the next books, but it did bug me a little bit.

My biggest issue with the novel was that it felt very much like "tell, don't show" in places. In particular, the background of the creation of Department Q is given entirely via a conversation between two of the higher-ups in the police force. There's no subtlety to it, and that may be in part a translation issue, but it bugged me. I also wish there hadn't been as much focus on Assad's religion and ethnicity. It's fine to mention it, but in the first part of the novel, it's his only defining trait. He was a really interesting character and, to the author's credit, he does get fleshed out a bit towards the end of the novel and some of the mystery surrounding him is intentional, but it still rubbed me a bit the wrong way.

Overall this is a pretty solid first book in a series. It had some rough areas, but mostly in areas that I expect to be less satisfying in a first in series. The first half of the book started slowly, but I appreciated the slow burn of the mystery and the tension it built. I was completely hooked by the end of the book, and I know it won't be long before I'm reading book 2! ...more

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