The Keeper of Lost Causes

After a shoot-out which left his team decimated, Detective Carl Mørck is “promoted” to the basement to run Department Q, but with Mørck’s stubbornness and office assistant Assad’s shady skills, the two of them may just surprise all the naysayers. This one takes a little while to get going since Mørck starts off quite an off-putting character, but once we're up to speed with all the different voices, it becomes extremely engaging. Even after the beginning, Mørck can get a little too negative at times, but Assad's semi-(or is it pseudo-?)innocent charm and murky MO easily balances it out and the combination of the two together is why the story works so well - the sum is much greater than the total of the parts. And, although show more what actually happens to Merete Lynggaard beggars belief on a major scale and the ending veers slightly toward convenient, I'm enamored enough with all the characters to suspend my belief and be horrified on her behalf. Beware that there are some cruel torture scenes in this one that might not be for the faint of heart - there's especially one scene involving a tooth that had even me gagging a bit. Highly recommended for my fellow grim-and-gruesome mystery fans. Note that I read this in Swedish and can't vouch for the English translation. show less

Another Scandinavian mystery. I'm hooked on this genre ever since Dragon Tattoo. This one, the first featuring Carl Morck, was quite good. I'm not sure if I bought the whole motivation of the crime. However, I enjoyed the writing. The character of Carl Morck, a brilliant detective who is lazy but whose curiousity always spurs him on to solve the case in spite of himself, is a real kick. The book does have the dark noirish quality typical of Scandinavian thrillers, but, uniquely, features a real sense of humor that is a breath of fresh air. His curmudgeonly interactions with his superiors, new assistant, and annoying ex-wife are very funny & actually made me laugh out loud several times.

This is a dark, twisty story. One that leads you into multiple directions, with a splash of the worst that humanity offers. We have Carl Mork, a broken homicide detective filled with guilt and PTSD over a raid gone wrong. Than there's Merete - a politician who went missing a number of years earlier. The two stories will intersect when Carl decides to take on the missing politician case as his first Department Q assignment.

So, this is a dark story - at times gory, but also a bit humorous, from Carl's estranged, to how Carl treats his assistant, Assad. Its a really good book of the genre. Its not going to win literary awards, but as a mystery, its very well written.

Das Buch beginnt - nach dem obligatorischen Prolog, der einen einstimmt auf das was kommt - eher verhalten. In zwei zeitlich versetzten Erzählsträngen werden auf den ersten 70 Seiten die Hauptpersonen beschrieben.
Carl - ein sich selbst zermürbender Vizepolizeikommissar, seitdem während einer Mordermittlung ein Kollege starb und ein anderer schwer verletzt wurde, er selbst hingegen nur eine Schramme davontrug. Da niemand mit ihm zusammenarbeiten möchte, wird er 'wegbefördert': Zum Leiter des Sonderdezernat Q, spezialisiert auf lang zurückliegende, ungelöste Fälle. Ihm zur Seite steht Hafez el-Assad, eine syrische Hilfskraft als Mädchen für alles, der sich jedoch schnell auf eine unnachahmliche Art und Weise unersetzlich show more macht. Er ist es auch, der den Fall des ungeklärten Verschwindens von Merete Lynggard aus den Aktenbergen hervorkramt.
Der zweite Erzählstrang handelt von Merete Lynggard, beginnend fünf Jahre zuvor einige Zeit vor ihrer Entführung. Während einer Reise mit ihrem Bruder wird sie betäubt und findet sich in einem dunklen Betonverlies wieder, das sie für lange Zeit nicht mehr verlassen wird.
Auch wenn diser Thriller vergleichsweise wenig Blut und Gemetzel zu bieten hat und die Lösung relativ bald klar ist, lässt er an Spannung und Grausamkeit nichts zu wünschen übrig. Die Schilderungen von Meretes Isolationshaft, ihre Versuche ihren Lebenswillen aufrecht zu erhalten, der Kampf darum einen Rest von Würde zu bewahren - eindringlicher geht es kaum. Oder die Beschreibung ihrer Zahnschmerzen - es stehen einem die Nackenhaare zu Berge (mir zumindest). Fairerweise muss man dazu schreiben, dass dieser Teil nur ca. ein Drittel des Buches ausmacht. Der Rest 'gehört' den Ermittlern.
Doch dies liest sich ebenso spannend und streckenweise durchaus amüsant, insbesondere was die Zusammenarbeit von Carl und Assad betrifft. Auch für Fortsetzungen sind genügend Handlungsfäden ausgelegt: Gelingt es Carl doch noch, die schöne Polizeipsychologin zum Essen einzuladen? Wie kommt sein behinderter Kollege mit der Situation klar? Welches Geheimnis verbirgt Assad?
Alles in allem: Empfehlenswert, daher: LESEN! show less

Except for the novels of Norwegian Karin Fossum, I hadn’t read any of the Scandinavian crime fiction that’s all the rage. Not Jo Nesbø, not Henning Mankell, not Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, not even Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

OK, so I live in a cave.

For that reason, I really can’t compare Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Keeper of Lost Causes to other Scandinavian crime novels. Are they all this dark? Are their protagonists as curmudgeonly as Adler-Olsen’s Carl Mørck, a police deputy superintendent whose lost whatever little joy he had in life when one partner was killed and the other paralyzed during an ambush? For expedience’s sake, Carl gets “promoted” to head a cold-case department, nicknamed show more Department Q. His only staff is the deceptively sweet Hafez al-Assad, a man as adept at housekeeping as he is at ferreting out clues and getting witnesses to talk.

I enjoyed The Keeper of Lost Causes much more than I thought I would, and I got to really appreciate both curmudgeon Carl and the under-estimated Assad. Their uneasy camaraderie rivaled the riveting mystery to make this debut novel a five-star read. show less

Detective Carl Mørck survives a shooting that kills one his partners and paralyzes the others. A curmudgeon that no one else in the department likes, he finds himself "promoted" to lead the new Division Q funded by a national government initiative to solve cold cases. His superiors see to it that most of the money earmarked for Division Q goes into the general police funding, while Carl gets a basement office and one assistant, a charming Syrian refugee named Hafez al-Assad.

Carl is drawn to the case of a rising star in the Parliament, Merete Lynggaard, who disappeared on a ferry ride to Berlin. The police have decided she died by suicide or an accidental fall from the ship, but Carl suspects there's more to the story. During Merete's show more career in politics she had been very private of her personal life. Despite the gossip papers efforts to reveal a hidden romance, in reality she spent her off time caring for her younger brother Uffe. As a child, Merete survived a car crash that killed her parents and cause Uffe to be developmentally disabled and unable to speak. This crash will play an important part in the story in other ways. The reality is that she's been abducted and kept in a pressure chamber for five years by her cruel captors.

Carl is an "old-fashioned" type of detective, and not a very likable character but more pitiable than loathsome. Assad adds a lot of warmth and humor and is my favorite part of the book. I found the motivations of the villains to be implausible with no explanation other than they are "crazy" as Adler-Olsen keeps reminding us. But crazy people don't make compelling antagonists. The scenes with Merete in captivity are very unsettling and it reads almost like torture porn. There's copaganda too, as Carl and Assad are only able to save the day by breaking the rules. But there is humanity in this story to that keeps it engaging right up to the hopeful, but definitively not happy, ending. show less

There were some spicy passages to this gripping thriller, a little bit too much violence for my taste, but otherwise I thought it was a great introduction to Carl Mørck, Hardy Henningson, Hafez el-Assad, Mona Ibsen and the little world that will blossom later in the series.
Mørck is a tough nut with a heavy baggage, but the character I found really interesting is Syrian refugee, Assad: a man of many talents. Overall, there was a little too much brilliance (are folks really that smart in real life?) but the story unfolds in a punchy and gripping way: I definitely couldn't put the book down in the last chapters.