I enjoyed this Scandi crime drama, with an anti-hero detective, who has lost all his ambition and energy following an event where a colleague was killed and another seriously injured. Carl tries very hard to do as little as possible even when he is given his own department looking at old cases.
HIs cleaner/assistant Assad clearly has a very interesting background and begins to look into a past case which quickly leads us into a tense kidnap storyline. The tension really builds as the two stories begin to come together and the flashback chapters from the kidnap victim’s
viewpoint really draw you in.
Although I don’t think the book is quite up there with the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy, it is an original take on the detective/thriller genre and I’m looking forward to reading the other two Department Q novels published to date.
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