What's in this book
- Jussi Adler-Olsen's 2013 fourth Department Q novel - Morck investigates a 1980s sterilization clinic
- Glass Key Award winner 2014; the structural moral peak of the Department Q series
- 496 pages assembling Cold War-era Danish forced-sterilization history into a contemporary cold-case procedural
- Series continues across The Marco Effect, The Hanging Girl, The Scarred Woman, Victim 2117
- Graeme Malcolm audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of A Conspiracy of Faith, the broader Department Q series, and canonical Nordic noir
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 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.
Related reads
If you liked The Purity of Vengeance
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 Absent one
by Jussi Adler-Olsen
The second Department Q book. An old boarding-school case the Danish elite would prefer stayed cold.
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.
Blind Date
by Frances Fyfield
Frances Fyfield's 1998 standalone. A traumatized woman ex-cop and the killer who took her sister. One of the British psychological-thriller form's genuine peaks.
More by this author