The Keeper of Lost Causes: The First Department Q Novel (A Department Q Novel) Paperback – July 31, 2012

Some of the technical things were difficult to follow for me, but the snarly (but lovable) Detective Carl and his intriguing side kick Assad held my interest for sure. Especially when Assad became a badass who saved the day at the end.I look forward to the next book in the series to learn more about what the characters will surprise us with.

This book was recommended to me since I generally like Scandinavian mysteries. It was sitting there in my reading queue, so I thought why not? I'll read you next.Then I started reading and I groaned because it seemed this was going to be just another moody Scandinavian mystery with a dour, emotionally and psychologically damaged detective with a crazy ex-wife. But I kept reading and soon discovered how wrong my first impression was. This was one funny book!Well, perhaps I should explain here that the main mystery involves a horrendous crime starting with the kidnapping from a ferry of a young, dynamic, and beautiful Danish politician. Details of her kidnapping and the crimes against her are sprinkled throughout the book, interspersed with the chapters that detail the detectives' efforts to solve her mysterious disappearance, and some of those chapters are very hard to read, particularly if one suffers at all from claustrophobia. Fortunately, the chapters about the detectives are much lighter, some of them laugh-out-loud funny. I found myself frequently chuckling at the interactions between the two main characters.Jussi Adler-Olsen introduces us to Carl Mørck, a detective with the Copenhagen police. We meet him as he is just recovering from a terrible experience.As he and two partners were following leads on a case, they were jumped by two gunmen. In a hail of bullets, one partner was killed outright; another was paralyzed and there seems no hope for his recovery; Carl Mørck was shot in the head but escaped with only an interesting scar. His shame and guilt, however, is that he never drew his weapon during the shootout.Carl is a brilliant and intuitive detective, but he is also a pain in the butt. None of his colleagues wants to work with him, so when his boss gets news that funds have been allocated for a new department, an ideal solution occurs to him: He will assign Mørck to be the head and only member of the new department.That is Department Q, The Keeper of Lost Causes. The commission of the department will be to reopen cold cases, lost causes, and clear them.Carl Mørck is not amused by his new assignment. So he sits with stacks of these "dead" cases on his desk and plays games on his computer. Then he learns something about the amount of money that has been appropriated for his department and he demands of his boss, Marcus, that he hire an assistant for him, someone he envisions as a janitor to keep the place clean. He also demands more up-to-date equipment and a car. Marcus gives him everything he asks for just to keep Carl in his basement office and out of his hair.The "janitor" that Marcus sends him turns out to be much more than that. His name (he says) is Hafez el-Assad. He is a Syrian refugee, a political asylee, who, slowly, during the course of the book unpacks a bewildering package of skills and knowledge.Who is this man and what is his background? When it comes to detecting, he matches the brilliance of Carl Mørck. Even though he is not supposed to be involved in the investigatory side of the department, he manages to insinuate himself and Mørck gradually learns to depend upon him, even though he is still suspicious of his background.Assad prods Carl into action on the case files covering his desk, and the first one they pick up is that politician who was kidnapped back in 2002. It is now 2007 and that case is very cold indeed.As Carl and Assad look at the case file, they realize that it was sloppily done. Things were overlooked or mishandled and slowly they follow every little discrepancy, teasing them out, and looking for a solution to the problem.Reading the interactions between Carl and Assad was just a delight. They play off each other very well and as their relationship grows and deepens, the humor becomes both drier and broader. I fell in love with charming Assad and even dour Carl and I am eager to learn more about them in future books. I think Jussi Adler-Olsen has created a couple of winners here.

This is so well written! It might seem to drag and yet the case(s) move forward, you learn more about the characters and all the while, the tension builds. It is fascinating how clues are discovered and then put to use. You truly become invested in each if the characters. This one of the best books I've read in some time!

Danish detective Carl Mørck is returning to work after recovering from a gunshot wound suffered in a battle at a crime scene that left one of his partners dead and the other a quadriplegic. Mørck's a maverick and while his talents as an investigator are acknowledged by his fellow policemen and superiors, it's been decided that he will be kicked upstairs, metaphorically speaking, and given command of a new division dubbed Department Q that will specialize in cold and hard-to-crack cases to keep him well out of the way. With a staff consisting of one Syrian migrant, Assad, as his general assistant and office cleaner, his first case is one that could have been a suicide, a kidnapping, or a murder of a prominent politician, Merete Lynggaard, who disappeared from a Baltic Sea ferry five years previously. What really happened on that ferry and whatever happened to Merete?The characters make this book work as well as it does, not the strangely complex crime setup.Carl Mørck is a study in contrasts. On one hand he's lazy and has a low opinion of many of his fellow detectives for their sloppy work; on the other hand he's an inspired investigator and puzzle solver who can find meaning in the smallest piece of information or evidence and run with it towards a logical conclusion to find more links to the crime and criminals. Once given the challenge of a real case, stand back and stay out of his way.My favorite character was Assad the supposed Syrian migrant who becomes Mørck's assistant, originally meant to be an office cleaner, coffee fetcher, and general go-fer. Instead he becomes an unofficial investigator who not only chooses the case to be worked on, but goads Mørck into actually working on it. As the story moves along, it becomes obvious that Assad is much more than he seems and part of that includes a knack for detective work.As for the mystery, while the steps toward solving the disappearance of Merete Lynggaard form a good solvable puzzle for the reader, the revelation of the crime itself is nothing short of bizarre. For those readers who enjoy unrealistic and complex crimes, this will be perfect, but for those readers who prefer their fictional crimes to be more grounded in the possible and probable will be disappointed.If the Amazon rating system allowed it, this book would receive a 3.5 star rating. While I really liked all of the main characters, the crime itself was so far out as to be unbelievable and wildly unrealistic for a police procedural story. Because I did enjoy the characters so much, especially the mysterious Assad, I edged the rating up to an even 4 stars.Recommended for the characters, but only for those who have a high tolerance for oddball or crazy crimes.