The Shadow Murders
A Department Q Novel
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- ¥1,800
Publisher Description
INSPIRATION FOR THE NETFLIX SERIES DEPT. Q
In the exhilarating penultimate thriller of the New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling Department Q series, the team must hunt for a nefarious criminal who has slipped under the radar for decades.
On her sixtieth birthday, a woman takes her own life. When the case lands on Detective Carl Mørck’s desk, he can’t imagine what this has to do with Department Q, Copenhagen’s cold cases division since the cause of death seems apparent. However, his superior, Marcus Jacobsen, is convinced that this is related to an unsolved case that has been plaguing him since 1988.
At Marcus's behest, Carl and the Department Q gang—Rose, Assad, and Gordon—reluctantly begin to investigate. And they quickly discover that Marcus is onto something: Every two years for the past three decades, there have been unusual, impeccably timed deaths with connections between them that cannot be ignored, including mysterious piles of salt at the scenes. As the investigation goes deeper, it emerges that these "accidents" are in fact part of a sinister murder scheme.
Faced with their toughest case yet, made only more difficult by COVID-19 restrictions and the challenges of their personal lives, the Department Q team must race to find the culprit before the next murder is committed, as it is becoming increasingly clear that the killer is far from finished.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
