For full disclosure, when this blog posts I will be in Dauphin Island, Alabama and will have been since Wednesday. I am just positive on Tuesday as I write this that I will have a wonderful time and will not want to come home. I have been packing my book bag for weeks and I am positive that it weighs more than my suitcase! I thought that I had finally finished but I kept getting tweets from Farin Schlussel, a marketing intern at Dutton Books, going on and on about this great new book. I knew the book was in my bag so I just decided to go on and read it. I will most likely finish it in the car tomorrow and I am totally not disappointed that I unpacked it!
Just for fun let’s take a count on how many Scandinavian Authors everyone has read in the past few
years? I need more than one hand for this game! Guess what? I’m about to introduce you to another one…meet Jussi Adler-Olsen. He is from Denmark, has won the Glass Key Award (along with Mankell, Larsson and Hoeg), has been at the top of the bestseller lists in Denmark, Germany, and Austria. The Keeper of Lost Causes is his American debut.
Carl was one of the best homicide detectives in Copenhagen until he was shot while on a case. He survived but his partners were not so lucky. One was killed and the other is paralyzed and still in the hospital and Carl blames himself for what has happened. Of course, he has some marital problems though still married his wife moved out and has a few boyfriends while her son lives with Carl. He has gone back to work and no one wants to work with him and the chief of detectives has come up with a plan. Carl is going to be ‘promoted’ to run Department Q, a new division that has been organized to work on cold cases. He will be the only one in the department except for his new assistant, Assad. Carl and Assad continuously bicker back and forth and it really is the comedy relief through out the book because the first case that they begin to work on is a wild one.
The first case that Carl picks for Department Q to work on is a missing persons case. Five years earlier an up and coming politician disappeared without a trace. She was last seen on a ferry going on holiday so the ‘world’ assumes that she fell into the water and drowned but her body was never found. After reading the file Carl’s interest is piqued as well as Assad’s who cannot wait to do some police work. As he back tracks on the clues left in the file he begins to realize that some things were left out or just not followed up on and in his gut he feels that Merete Lynggaard is waiting somewhere for him to find. What he is not sure of is if he will find her dead or alive.
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