THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES: JUSSI ADLER-OLSEN

It's back to the dark, miserable lives of Northern European detectives, but this time instead of Kurt Wallender or Harry Hole, it's Denmark's Carl Morck, just as troubled and depressed as the rest. It's the first in Adler-Olsen's Department Q novels.  Morck, because he's older, independent, often uncooperative and is recovering from a gunshot wound, is kicked downstairs to head a previously non existent department.  To make matters worse, he is given no help, only Assad, supposedly a janitor, a man of mystery, who ends up being Carl's ace in the hole, but not at first.

The book opens with the kidnapping and imprisonment of Merete Lynggaard, a rising politician, who vows to do anything but give in to her jailers.  Only later to we discover that she's been kidnapped five years earlier and kept in solitary confinement.  This case, long dead because she disappeared and had never been found, arrives on Carl Morck desk because Department Q has been created to look back at dead cases.  Merete's case arrives on his desk with several others and arbitrarily, he picks it up and decides to look into the facts.  The novel then moves back and forth between what's happening to Merete over the years, her mind set, how her captors treat her.  Morck, with the help of the seemingly inept Assad, begins to go back over the case, realizes many leads have not been followed, especially two facts. First, that when Merete was a teenager, she was involved in car accident, which killed both her parents, leaving her brother dependent on her, as well as killing the father of another family.  Morck's break through comes when he gets Merete's brother,Uffe, who has not spoken or shown any understanding for years, to react to a photograph of a young man who appeared at Merete's door just before she was kidnapped. As Morck and Assad sift through the evidence, they find out that the man in the photograph not only was placed in a home for delinquents but coincidentally, is the son of the father killed in the traffic accident.

Morck meets with the man's mother, who still lives on the grounds of her husband's now defunct factory, but she denies that her son is around that he is abroad on a boat.  Morck and Assad discover, from the freight lines, that his is not true and return to the home and realize there are various strange storage buildings on the grounds. Eventually, they discover where Merete has been hidden for five years, just before she has decided to commit suicide.  Morck realizes that her imprisonment is all payback to Merete for supposedly causing the accident, the death of the family's father five years earlier.  The novel ends with Merete reunited with her brother Uffe, and the death of Merete's jailer by Assad, saving Morck's life.

This is the first novel by Adler-Olsen and I liked it enough to read the next one, a nice break from the other kinds of books I have been reading.