By Dennis Fischman

Recently, I heard that Netflix had issued a new TV series, Dept. Q, based on a set of mystery novels that fall into the category of Nordic Noir. The first season is getting good reviews, and I thought I would go take a look at the books.

Unfortunately, reading The Keeper of Lost Causes (Department Q, #1) makes me less likely to watch the TV series. Here’s why, and here’s why your mileage may differ.

First off, this is not really a mystery. You, the reader, know the crime from the very beginning: a woman has been kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured for years while most people believe she has drowned herself. Who is torturing her, and why, also becomes clear to the reader early on. So, you are more likely to enjoy this book if you approach it as a suspense thriller and not a mystery.

“The Keeper of Lost Causes (Department Q, #1)” by Jussi Adler-Olsen, Wheeler Publishing, 2011.

The only question about the crime is how soon the cold case squad in Copenhagen will catch on, and how. That squad, the Department Q of the title, is headed by Carl Morck, who used to be a brilliant detective in the homicide unit but has become immobilized by guilt over the death of one of his former partners and the disabling spinal injury of another. His superiors create Department Q partly to kick him upstairs (and get him out of the way of the current homicide investigations). But also, because they can get a lot of money from the Danish government for their department, only a little bit of which they will share with Morck.

So, even though it’s not mysterious, the police procedural side of the series is promising. It reminds me of Slow Horses, another series about agents who have screwed up on the job and been put out of the way in a back office that has been turned into a successful TV series. And I enjoyed those books!

Sad to say, the second reason I did not like the book was that, for a brilliant detective, Morck is oblivious. I felt like shouting at him over and over for clues he was missing. He doesn’t even recognize that the assistant who’s been assigned to him, called Hafez al-Assad, is using the name of the former dictator of Syria. So, there’s something mysterious about that guy, right under Morck’s nose, and he misses it.

If you end up enjoying the book, it may owe something to the “Assad” character and the growing relationship between the two of them in Department Q. (And I notice that the TV series gives him a different name from the start!)

Third, and for me, this is the kicker: I am really tired of women being victimized in fiction in gruesome ways just so an investigation can take place. To be fair, the woman in this book is not passive, not weak, not wholly at the mercy of Our Hero to save her, so it’s better than the average noir in that way. Precisely for those reasons, however, I resented the author – even more than the fictitious criminals – for putting her through all that. Their reasons have little to do with her, but they do relate to an event in her past. They are sincere. The author is just out to sell books.

In short, this is yet another book where a woman is trapped and tortured for reasons which are both obvious and stupid, while a guilt-ridden policeman finds himself alive again because of male bonding with his sidekick. Not my thing at all. Judge for yourself whether it is the book for you.