Category Archives: Jussi Adler-Olsen

Review: DISGRACE by Jussi Adler-Olsen

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In Adler-Olsen’s second novel to be translated into English we meet a very unsavoury group of criminals who, since they were teenagers together at boarding school, have loved nothing better than fuelling themselves up on illicit drugs then violently attacking someone, sometimes to the point of death. They also hunt and kill animals and indulge in the odd rape for good measure.

In Department Q, the Copenhagen Police’s group responsible for clearing up cold crimes, grumpy and work-shy detective Carl Moerk finds the case of a years-old murder of a brother and sister on his desk. Unsure who has referred the case Moerk and his sidekick, the cleaner turned assistant Assad tentatively start looking into the matter, even though someone confessed to the murder and is serving a prison sentence for it. But Department Q soon learn that there were likely more people involved in the murder, that those people are from the country’s elite families and that they’ve committed far more than one crime.

As with the first book in this series the police characters are very enjoyable to read about. Although naturally lazy Carl is an intelligent policeman and he doesn’t like being dissuaded from a case for political reasons. Assad, an Iranian immigrant, is also clever and happy to do Carl’s grunt work while providing a nice line in homespun philosophy. In this book the men of Department Q are joined by a female colleague in the form of Rose who is meant to be some kind of administrative assistant but is soon just about running the place. She has some of the best, bitingly sarcastic lines in the novel.

The story itself and the focus on the criminal characters did not make for outstanding reading. Introducing the criminals early on is a reasonably common plot device these days and it can work well when the author goes on to delve into why the characters turned into the criminals we meet. Adler-Olsen doesn’t really do that here though, seemingly content with describing (at some length) the almost ludicrous number of violent episodes the gang engage in. There is one person – known as Kimmie – who has broken away from the gang and lives on the streets – who (I imagine) readers are meant to develop a connection with but I’m afraid I really didn’t. I could see that she’d had something of a rough start in life but I could also see that much of the horrid stuff that happened to her was a direct result of her own appalling behaviour and I couldn’t really summon up much energy in caring whether she outwitted her former friends or not. The rest of the gang are evil to the point of caricature, as is the depiction of the lives of ‘the elite’ versus lives of ‘normal people’ so that aspect of the novel didn’t really grab me either.

This book has a little too much ‘what’ (endless details of the various attacks by the gang either from their own points of view or that of their victims) and not enough ‘why’ for me.  I thought the story weak and not nearly suspense-filled enough for its 14+ hours as an audio book (though narrator Stephen Pacey is a delight to listen to as always). In the end there is a solid enough work of crime fiction thanks to the dogged, and amusing performance of the folk of Department Q but, for me, this book is not in the same class as the author’s previous novel.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Other reviews of DISGRACE are at Petrona, Shade Point and Wicked Wonderful Words

I’ve also reviewed the first book in this series, MERCY 

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3/5
Translator Kyle Semmel
Narrator Stephen Pacey
Publisher Penguin Books [2012]
ASIN B0089Z6JXU
Length 14 hours 12 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #2 in the Department Q series
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Books of the Month – October 2011

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I didn’t manage a lot of reviewing in October but was lucky enough to have a couple of 5-star reads which means Book of the month is a difficult choice so I’m not going to make it. Tom Franklin‘s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is an absorbing tale about two boys who grown into men, set in rural Mississippi it captures the languid pace of the location beautifully. Although in many ways it is a book that concerns itself with race and racism it isn’t consumed by those issues in the way that a polemic would be. My second 5-star read was Alice LaPlante‘s Turn of Mind which is about Jennifer White, a surgeon who is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and is also suspected of the murder of her friend and neighbour. The crime element takes second place to the exploration of the progression of the disease and Jennifer’s attempts to maintain some semblance of control.

Other recommended reads from the month are:

Arnaldur Indriðason‘s Outrage starts out as the investigation of the murder of a young man but ends up as something quite different. It’s one of those storylines you can imagine happening in your own world (unlike the serial killers making suits of human skin variety of book), 4 stars

Barry Maitland‘s Chelsea Mansions is a very tightly plotted police procedural which investigates the murder of an elderly American tourist in London. It’s full of plot twists, interesting characters and fascinating details about an intriguing part of London . 3.5 stars.

The Gallows Bird by Camilla Läckberg is another enjoyable instalment in the adventures of Patrick Hedstrom, his soon to be wife and the slightly incompetent police force of a small town in south west Sweden. I like the combination of humour, personal lives and good old-fashioned policing. 3.5 stars.

Carolyn Morwood‘s Death and the Spanish Lady is the start of a new series set in Australia after the end of World War One. Melbourne is in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic but when one hospital patient is murdered nurse Eleanor Jones is determined to uncover the truth. The historical fiction aspects of this novel are excellent and the characters are enjoyable to meet, the crime is a little bit simple to solve but overall this is a very enjoyable novel. 3.5 stars.

Dan Waddell‘s Blood Atonement is the second book to feature genealogist Nigel Barnes who helps the English police solve a series of crimes that appear to have something to do with one particular family lineage. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable book with a nice mix of sweet moments and hard policing for the professional investigators. 3.5 stars.

Denise Mina’s The End of the Wasp Season was a bit of a mixed bag for me as I thought the story’s structure and individual characterisations were terrific but there was a bit of a stereotypical feel to ‘rich people are awful, poor people are good-hearted’ tone of the book. 3 stars.

John Lawton‘s Second Violin is a sweeping epic set across the leadup to the Second World War and the first couple of years of the conflict. I did find it insightful about some issues, particularly the daft internment camps though I thought it a bit too ambitious in its scope. I’d have preferred it to focus on a few events in more depth whereas it seemed to me to cram all the major events and an example of every kind of war time experience into one novel. 3 stars.

Jussi Adler-Olsson‘s Mercy is a Danish novel telling the story of a difficult cop and his almost reluctant hunt for a woman who has been missing for 5 years. The book is funny and moving (sometimes at the same moment) and very compelling. 4.5 stars

The Man Who Went up in Smoke by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. The Martin Beck books are considered modern classics of crime fiction and I’m slowly reading them in order. This is number two and sees the main character travel from his native Sweden to locate a journalist who went missing in Hungary. 3.5 stars.

Nicole Watson‘s The Boundary tells the story of the aftermath of an unsuccessful native title claim made by the Corrowa people of Brisbane. Hours after handing down his judgment with respect to the claim the Judge who presided over the case is murdered and it’s not long before Police focus on the people involved with the claim as suspects. It is a fine addition to the growing library of contemporary Australian crime fiction which examines our society intelligently and realistically while telling a ripping yarn. 4 stars

Ruth Rendell‘s The Vault uses a fairly unbelievable premise to get now retired Reg Wexford, formerly of Kingsmarkham police, back into an investigation but that aside it’s a nicely complex story which has something of a love affair with the city of London. 3.5 stars

S J Bolton‘s Now You See Me is a bit of a departure for this author, being her first police procedural. It’s major storyline involved someone copying the crimes of Jack the Ripper which left me a little cold I admit but it’s full of suspense as always with Bolton. 3 stars

I thought for a minute that Ashes to Dust by Yrsa Sigurdardottir had become mixed up with a Monty Python sketch when it started talking about the Cod War of the 1970′s but it was a real thing between Britain and Iceland. And people say crime fiction doesn’t teach you anything about the human condition. The book is funny and clever and it has a volcano. 3.5 stars.

Other happenings at the blog

Things were a bit quiet other than this, though I didn’t review Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca which generated a good discussion and I didn’t review Booker Prize shortlisted Snowdrops either. This one generated the nastiest (and most bizarre) email I’ve had since starting the blog. The silver lining to that cloud may be that I’ve learned a good Russian curse word but I want to check it out with a colleague who speaks fluent Russian before I start using it in impolite conversation.

My lone contribution to the SinC25 challenge was a post about genre busting female crime (or not) writers. Sorry Barbara, I’ll try to do better in November.

My review of reading apps available on the iPad is quite handy if I do say so myself, though I think there might need to be a part two in a couple of months.

What about you…was October a good reading month? Did you have a favourite book? Or did you acquire anything you’re itching to read? Any issue you need to get off your chest?

Review: Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen

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Note: this book is published in the US as The Keeper of Lost Causes and is referred to at the author’s website as The Woman in the Cage.

Given that everyone in the world has already read this book (refer links below) there doesn’t seem much point in writing this review but my life appears to be full of pointless pursuits these days so one more can’t hurt. Perhaps if I add my voice to the chorus of positive reviews there might be a hastening of the translation of other volumes by this clearly talented author?

Mercy tells us two stories. The first is the story of Merete Lynggaard, a successful politician who disappears very suddenly one day in 2002. While the rest of the world thinks her dead, drowned when falling or jumping from the ferry she was travelling on, we learn that she is alive and imprisoned in horrendous circumstances. Merete’s part of the book takes us back through her life as well as depicting her current circumstances in such an affecting way that I was close to hyperventilating more than once (I am extremely claustrophobic and the descriptions are all too realistic).

The second story is that of Carl Mørck who is a Detective with the Danish police. As the book opens he is returning to work after a traumatic incident in which he was shot, one of his colleagues was murdered and another was crippled for life. Carl’s entire focus as he comes back to work is to ensure that he can do as little as possible while still getting paid and his employers are keen to sideline him too. With the help of a new source of funding they establish a new Department for Carl to head up which will investigate unsolved cases. Putting Carl out on his own is seen as advisable as no one likes working with him and the bosses have plans to use much of the allocated money for their own ongoing investigations. Carl sets himself up in his basement office, where he spends days surfing the net and arranging case files in piles (but putting off actually looking at them) and prepares to do not much at all. But one of his demands in the bargaining that he conducted with his superiors was for an assistant who could do cleaning and make coffee and the man assigned to him, Assad, forces Carl to actually open some of the cold case files. And he becomes intrigued in spite of himself. When they decide to focus on the Lynggaard case Carl and Assad (who takes on a wide array of duties, most of which would not normally be performed by a cleaner) cleverly uncover the mistakes made by the initial investigation and doggedly work their way towards finding an answer to the mysterious disappearance.

People (and book blurbs) are always keen to paint Scandinavian crime fiction as universally bleak and miserable but this book is hardly that. While individual circumstances are indeed on a scale from merely bad to utterly horrific there is a strong sense of humour throughout Mercy and this is where Lisa Hartford’s superb translation skills are most evident. There were many genuine laughs in the book for me, especially from the dialogue between Carl and Assad or Carl and his superiors and I am always extra impressed when linguistic humour can be translated and remain funny.

Another element that keeps this book from being too grim is the depiction of Merete. Perhaps because I know that if I were in her situation I would have curled into the foetal position and died I loved the way she was shown to be keeping her sanity and wits. She is locked alone in a room with no distractions, no comforts and no human contact for a very (very) long period and yet she never lets it get to her, or at least not for too long. Thankfully Adler-Olsen resisted the temptation to infuse her imprisonment with any kind of sexual or violent torture which also scores extra points with me as that particular trope has worn very thin.

From a plotting perspective it’s not that difficult to work out who must be responsible for Merete’s kidnapping but there is a lot else going on to keep the reader engaged and guessing right up until the end. The unveiling of the characters’ back stories and the ongoing battles that Carl has with his superiors and colleagues, not to mention his beleaguered family life, provide plenty of tension and intrigue. This really is a multi-threaded story but kept well controlled so that you don’t, as a reader, feel confused at all.

In short this is a tremendously good read with excellent characters, lots of interesting storylines and offering a credible depiction of a modern bureaucracy with all its flaws. If there does happen to be anyone left who hasn’t read it then my only advice is to do so. Now. I eagerly await the next translated volume.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This book (either as Mercy or as The Keeper of Lost Causes) has been reviewed at Crime Scraps, DJ’s Krimiblog, Euro Crime (By Maxine), How Mysterious, Mysteries in Paradise, Reading Matters, The Nordic Bookblog,

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 4.5/5
Author website http://www.jussiadlerolsen.com/
Translator Lisa Hartford [aka Tina Nunnally]
Publisher Penguin [this translation 2011, original edition 2008]
ISBN 9780141399966
Length 504 pages
Format paperback
Book Series #1 in the Department Q series
Source I bought it

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