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The Purity of Vengeance is the Department Q novel where Jussi Adler-Olsen takes on a piece of Danish history that the country had not properly reckoned with: the women's reformatory on the island of Sprogo, where, between the 1920s and 1961, "morally weak" young women were forcibly sterilized and held against their will. Adler-Olsen's cold case is the disappearance, decades later, of a number of older men who had connections to the Sprogo eugenics program.
The investigation alternates with chapters from the killer's perspective and from the perspective of one of the surviving Sprogo women. Adler-Olsen has done the historical work, and the Sprogo chapters are some of the most haunting writing in the series. The mystery of who is killing the men is solved relatively early. The mystery the book is actually interested in is whether what is happening to them is justice.
Five stars. Some of the best Scandinavian crime fiction of its decade and a book that says something about national memory that fewer thrillers attempt. Read after The Keeper of Lost Causes, The Absent One, and A Conspiracy of Faith.
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The Absent one
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The second Department Q book. An old boarding-school case the Danish elite would prefer stayed cold.
The Marco Effect
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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
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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.
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Adler-Olsen's pre-Department Q standalone. Two British airmen hiding in a Nazi psychiatric hospital. Very different from his crime novels.
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