Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
The Absent One is the second Department Q novel, and it is the book where Jussi Adler-Olsen widened the series' moral aperture. The case here is a decades-old double murder at a Danish boarding school, with a probable killer the police already declared mentally ill and a likely accomplice circle of the country's wealthiest old families.
Carl Morck and Assad work the case in their usual ill-tempered partnership, and the new addition to Department Q, Rose, slides into the basement with a personality that is going to take over the office. The investigation itself is the kind of slow-burning class-rage story that Scandinavian crime fiction is sometimes uniquely good at. The villain set, when you finally meet them properly, are convincingly awful in the way only inherited money can be.
A couple of plot moves stretch a little farther than I quite believed. The series-level pleasure remains intact. Four stars. Read this one as part of the Department Q sequence rather than starting cold.
Related reads
If you liked The Absent one
A Conspiracy of Faith
by Jussi Adler-Olsen
The third Department Q novel. Carl Morck investigates a message in a bottle written in blood. The best book in a great series.
The Purity of Vengeance
by Jussi Adler-Olsen
The fourth Department Q novel. The Danish eugenics program at Sprogo, four decades on. Adler-Olsen at his most morally serious.
The Marco Effect
by Jussi Adler-Olsen
The fifth Department Q novel. A Roma boy on the run from his family is the only witness to something the Danish foreign ministry is hiding.
The Keeper of Lost Causes
by Jussi Adler-Olsen
The first Department Q novel. Detective Carl Morck goes down to the basement and finds a five-year-old missing-politician case. The series begins here.
The Alphabet House
by Jussi Adler-Olsen
Adler-Olsen's pre-Department Q standalone. Two British airmen hiding in a Nazi psychiatric hospital. Very different from his crime novels.
More by this author