The Shadow Murders (Department Q)

The Shadow Murders is the ninth book in the Department Q series by award-winning best-selling Danish author Jussi Adler Olsen. After attending the funeral of a suicide, Detective Inspector Carl Mørck's boss, Marcus Jacobsen brings him a case for Department Q to review.

Burying sixty-year-old Maja Petersen, Marcus recalls the niggle about the case of a garage explosion that took five mechanics and Maja's toddler son, Max, over thirty years earlier. The small, unexplained pile of table salt at the scene twigged a memory of another case with this same feature.

Mørck quickly sets his team to work tracking down that other case, while also examining anomalies in the garage case. A thorough examination of both files leads them to conclude that both were murders set up to look like accident or suicide.

They surmise there must be more cases and begin actively searching for others with the same salt feature, and when they look deeper, they discover that the common elements of the cases form a pattern: what look like ritual killings have apparently been going on for over three decades.

The victims, too, exhibit a common characteristic: all are morally deficient. Whoever is knocking them off is clever and imaginative, often relating their execution method to their source of notoriety.

With COVID cases, staff quarantined and another lockdown, Department Q find themselves assigned to a "hot" case: the murder of a woman charged with the very public murder of a thief, a case which, bizarrely, turns out to have links to their cold case.

Alternate narratives that start in 1982 and are intermittently inserted between chapters from Mørck and his team's 2020 perspective describe a group of vengeful women, vigilantes or street avengers targeting societal decay.

With its quirky team members: Rose Knudsen, ever-vocal with her loud criticism and complaint, Gordon Taylor, enthusiastic but still wet-behind-the-ears, and Assad, with his (possibly intentional) Manglish; Department Q interactions are usually entertaining and often blackly funny.

While Assad is distracted by problems with gaining asylum for his family, until the narcs turn up, Mørck is unaware of an investigation into allegations against him and his partners, Hardy Henningsen and Anker Høyer involving murder, cocaine and cash from their thirteen-year-old Nail Gun Case. This necessitates the team getting creative to avoid Mørck's arrest while they try to prevent the death of the next victim.

There's plenty of good detective work tracking down some truly nasty characters in this, the penultimate instalment of the Department Q series, and the cliff-hanger ending telegraphs the topic of the final book that will take the reader back to before the first book. Gripping Scandi noir

This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and the publisher.