The book jumps back and forth in time. Mørck’s plot takes place in 2007.
The other plot is much more engaging, even terrifying at times. If Alder-Olsen had stuck to this plot, the book would have been a decent, if not outstanding, Scandinavian mystery. The Syrian, Assad, pushes him into investigating the disappearance and presumed suicide of a Folketing politician, Merete Lynggaard. Mørck is morose, occasionally sarcastic, and a decent investigator. And, at first, Mørck isn’t interested in even reading the case files that have been sent down to him. When Mørck returns to duty a week or so later, he is shuffled down to the basement to head up Department Q, a department especially created for cold cases. Mørck gets the job because his bosses and most of his coworkers don’t like him and because his supervisor wants to pocket the new department’s budget for the homicide department. Mørck only has a recently immigrated Syrian mystery man to help him.
The perpetrators are still there and kill one of Mørck’s partners, paralyze another, and almost kill Mørck himself. The novel opens with Carl Mørck and his partners at the scene of a murder. What puzzles me is what these two plots are doing between the same set of covers. On the other hand, it’s a gut-wrenching captivity narrative. On the one hand, it’s a pretty good police procedural set in Copenhagen. I am still puzzled by what Jussi Alder-Olsen was really up to with The Keeper of Lost Causes.
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