The Purity of Vengeance

February 24, 2014
In the fourth entry in Adler-Olsen’s Department Q series, brilliant but hapless head detective Carl Mørck and his assistants—the feisty, demanding Rose and the devious Assad—are faced with a multiple-murder cold case dating back to the 1950s. That’s when Curt Wad, a closet fascist, performed secret involuntary abortions and sterilizations on “the unfit.” Surprisingly, Adler-Olsen manages to mix humor into a novel with such a dark back-story. Chief among the amusements are the extended effects a flu virus has on the department, which the author presents in painfully funny detail, and Mørck’s continuous victimization at the hands of his degenerate cousin. Both are enhanced by narrator Malcolm who treats a description of a bright red, leaky nose with the same crisp approach he might use for a Shakespearean sonnet. Malcolm presents the perennially sighing Mørck with a voice that fluctuates from despairing to wistful to cautiously hopeful, marked by swiftly dissipating moments of elation. There’s a tinge of amusement in Rose’s shrill and angry commands. And the virus-infected Assad speaks with a subdued voice that’s filtered through a stuffy nose. Malcolm is just as effective in rendering the novel’s more serious sections, capturing the smarmy unction and unbridled evil of Wad. A Dutton hardcover.

Starred review from October 21, 2013
Adler-Olsen’s fourth installment of his brilliant Department Q series is full of Danish jokes: pungent, dark, often excoriating ironies wrapped up in sarcastic Copenhagen Det. Carl Mørck’s latest personal and professional entanglements. He’s investigating a missing madam case from the 1980s, as well as trumped up accusations of his involvement in the debacle that killed one of his partners, incapacitated another, and exiled Mørck himself to the musty basement of the Department Q headquarters. Mørck may also be implicated in his own uncle’s drowning death. Meanwhile, villainous abortionist Dr. Carl Wad, the leader of the Purity Party, wants to cleanse Denmark, which he and his neo-Nazi followers believe is rotten, by forcibly sterilizing wayward and retarded women. Adler-Olsen merges story lines from 1955, 1987, and 2010 with ingenious aplomb, effortlessly mixing hilarities with horrors as one of Wad’s victims, Nete Hermansen, plans and executes a Hitchcockian revenge. This crime fiction tour de force could only have been devised by an author who can even turn stomach flu into a belly laugh.