The Purity of Vengeance

Starred review from October 21, 2013
Adler-Olsen’s fourth installment of his brilliant Department Q series is full of Danish jokes: pungent, dark, often excoriating ironies wrapped up in sarcastic Copenhagen Det. Carl Mørck’s latest personal and professional entanglements. He’s investigating a missing madam case from the 1980s, as well as trumped up accusations of his involvement in the debacle that killed one of his partners, incapacitated another, and exiled Mørck himself to the musty basement of the Department Q headquarters. Mørck may also be implicated in his own uncle’s drowning death. Meanwhile, villainous abortionist Dr. Carl Wad, the leader of the Purity Party, wants to cleanse Denmark, which he and his neo-Nazi followers believe is rotten, by forcibly sterilizing wayward and retarded women. Adler-Olsen merges story lines from 1955, 1987, and 2010 with ingenious aplomb, effortlessly mixing hilarities with horrors as one of Wad’s victims, Nete Hermansen, plans and executes a Hitchcockian revenge. This crime fiction tour de force could only have been devised by an author who can even turn stomach flu into a belly laugh.

February 24, 2014
In the fourth entry in Adler-Olsen’s Department Q series, brilliant but hapless head detective Carl Mørck and his assistants—the feisty, demanding Rose and the devious Assad—are faced with a multiple-murder cold case dating back to the 1950s. That’s when Curt Wad, a closet fascist, performed secret involuntary abortions and sterilizations on “the unfit.” Surprisingly, Adler-Olsen manages to mix humor into a novel with such a dark back-story. Chief among the amusements are the extended effects a flu virus has on the department, which the author presents in painfully funny detail, and Mørck’s continuous victimization at the hands of his degenerate cousin. Both are enhanced by narrator Malcolm who treats a description of a bright red, leaky nose with the same crisp approach he might use for a Shakespearean sonnet. Malcolm presents the perennially sighing Mørck with a voice that fluctuates from despairing to wistful to cautiously hopeful, marked by swiftly dissipating moments of elation. There’s a tinge of amusement in Rose’s shrill and angry commands. And the virus-infected Assad speaks with a subdued voice that’s filtered through a stuffy nose. Malcolm is just as effective in rendering the novel’s more serious sections, capturing the smarmy unction and unbridled evil of Wad. A Dutton hardcover.

December 15, 2013
Another cold case for the sturdy misfits of Copenhagen's Department Q, together with two more incomplete blasts from the past for Detective Carl Morck. Except for the prostitute who reported her missing, no one much cared when brothel keeper Rita Nielsen vanished back in 1987, and it's no wonder the case languished. Now, however, the mystery assumes new urgency with the news that she wasn't the only one to disappear. The very same day, attorney Philip Norvig, fisherman Viggo Mogensen, womens asylum guard Gitte Charles and do-nothing Tage Hermansen also went AWOL. Furthermore--though it takes Carl, his assistant, Hafez el-Assad, and his secretary, Rose Knudsen, quite a while to work this out--they all had links to Tage's cousin Nete Hermansen, long immured in a Sprogo home for fallen women, whose second chance at a respectable life was dashed when Dr. Curt Wad, a stalwart of the Purity Party, confronted her and her businessman husband publicly with some sordid details of her past. Adler-Olsen (A Conspiracy of Faith, 2012, etc.) cuts back and forth between the fatal day in 1987 when Nete decided to avenge herself on the people who had ruined her life and the present day, when Carl's investigation of both Nete and Wad is complicated by rumors that Carl helped his cousin Ronny kill Ronny's father many years ago and further hints of the horrific fatality that first sent Carl to Department Q. Fans can rest assured that neither of these lesser subplots comes anywhere near closure. Another accomplished exercise in three-decker suspense, though the climactic twist would be harder to predict if the story had ended 100 pages earlier.

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November 1, 2013
When your series relies on cold cases, it's not always easy to craft plots that have both historical interest and an air of urgency, but it's something Adler-Olsen is very good ateven if he's getting just a little bit less successful with each successive book. The fourth Department Q novel finds cranky Copenhagen detective Carl Mrck and his quirky but competent assistants, Assad and Rose, puzzling over a seemingly unconnected group of people who all went missing at the same time. We learn the perpetrator and her motive early on; the tension comes from Mrck's missteps and the dangers he's blind to. And while this labyrinthine revenge plot encompasses everything from eugenics and right-wing politics to Mrck's rocky love life, and includes a nifty twist at the end, the seams are starting to show. Police procedure is an afterthought, repercussions almost nonexistent, and the mystery of Assad's secret life has dragged on too long without meaningful development. Still good reading, but Adler-Olsen needs to tighten it up a little.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)