The Shadow Murders: A Department Q Novel

Opening teases don’t get much more tantalizing than in bestseller Adler-Olsen’s stellar ninth Department Q novel featuring Copenhagen’s cold-case division (after 2020’s Victim 2117). In 1982, six college students are killed by a bolt of lightning; an injured woman tells a first responder, with a creepy smile, that her survival means that she can survive anything, “with God’s help.” In 1988, when Maja Petersen goes to retrieve her car from an auto shop, along with her three-year-old son, the garage explodes, killing the child along with five men. In 2020, homicide chief Marcus Jacobsen asks his best investigator, Carl Mørck, to revisit the explosion after Maja dies by suicide. Both men were on the scene at the time, and Jacobsen has always felt there were some unresolved questions about the explosion. Those suspicions have been revived by the suicide and Jacobsen’s noting an anomaly in the official reports that he’d previously missed: someone, for some reason, left a three-inch pile of kitchen salt near the entrance to the garage. Their digging reveals other cases where such a pile was left. The climax lives up to the promise of the brilliant opening, cleverly connecting all the plotlines. Christopher Fowler fans will be riveted. (Sept.)