Dissolved

Blaedel (the Louise Rick series) and Nordbo (the Matthew Cave series) team up for a macabre police procedural set in Nordbo’s native village of Tommerup, on the tight-knit Danish island of Funen. Affable police inspector Liam Stark and his brusque middle-aged sergeant, Dea Torp, face a possible missing person case when Claus, the coach of Liam’s son’s water polo team, demands police mount a search for his vanished wife Charlotte. An enigmatic quotation from the Quran found in Charlotte’s bag suggests the involvement of religious extremists, which irks police rookie Nassrin, who’s sick of watching fellow people of Arab descent on police surveillance screens. The stakes are raised when new victims start disappearing daily, with enigmatic Quran passages left among their belongings, and Stark and Torp discover horrific video footage depicting some of the crimes. Blaedel and Nordbo cast the net of plausible suspects ever wider, maintaining suspense and keeping readers on the edge of their seats as the plot barrels toward a properly nightmarish conclusion. This is a gruesome Scandi noir success. Agent: Judith Toth, Nordin Agency. (Dec.)