The Keeper of Lost Causes

Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Keeper of Lost Causes (2011) is one of the better books I’ve read recently.

The book offers two stories told on different timelines: that of a missing woman, a politician destined for big things, and, a few years later, that of a police officer recovering from the physical and psychological effects of a shooting in which one fellow officer died and the other, his close friend Hardy, ended up paralyzed in a hospital bed.

In fact, when we meet Carl Mørck, we’re not given any reason to think that he’s going to make a good investigator. He doesn’t seem to care about anything anymore. Not knowing what else to do with him, his boss has created a new office, Department Q, and put Carl in charge of it (in the meantime syphoning off enough money from the government allotment to add a couple more teams to his own section). Carl demands an assistant and is given Assad, an over-eager Muslim immigrant who seems to catch on to police work pretty quickly; but Carl is content to sit in his basement office, kicked back in his chair, surfing the Internet or dozing.

Department Q is tasked with investigating unsolved cases, which Carl scans at Assad’s urging. They identify one case, that of the missing politician, that — despite Carl’s almost complete torpor — looks interesting. Carl and Assad (who’s supposed to be cleaning floors and the like) start digging, and soon they find clues and a trail that was missed during the first investigation five years ago. Working forward from Merete’s perspective while watching Department Q work backwards, the reader begins to figure out what happened and why.

There are all sorts of complications beyond just the five years elapsed since the crime: Merete’s disabled brother, her intensely private lifestyle, poor police work the first time around, and good planning by the criminal. All of these make the mystery more difficult to solve.

If I have one complaint it’s that I didn’t get a feel for Denmark, aside for perhaps a superficial view of the political and media systems, and I couldn’t say anything at all about Copenhagen from this portrayal. I do enjoy learning more about other countries when I read translated fiction, so that was a bit of a disappointment.

Still, the book is a mystery, not a travel novel, and it succeeds on that level. The whole idea of reinvestigating cold cases is usually interesting to me, and Carl and Assad are appealing characters whom I hope will return in English soon.

Book #11 in the Nordic Challenge