4thace reviewed The keeper of lost causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen (Department q)
Review of 'The keeper of lost causes' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I don't remember how this book was recommended to me years ago, but it has been on my to-read list for a long time now and I am glad I had a chance to get to it. This first novel in a successful detective series has a flawed main character described in such a fashion that you end up wanting him to succeed. He is coming back from a traumatic and violent experience and only slowly becoming aware of how badly it has messed him up, at the same time he's having to put up with political maneuverings at the police station where he works and tribulations on the home front. But his one talent of worming out the facts of cases which other detectives have abandoned along with support from his one partner lead him to the facts in a case which has gone cold for years. Interspersed with …
I don't remember how this book was recommended to me years ago, but it has been on my to-read list for a long time now and I am glad I had a chance to get to it. This first novel in a successful detective series has a flawed main character described in such a fashion that you end up wanting him to succeed. He is coming back from a traumatic and violent experience and only slowly becoming aware of how badly it has messed him up, at the same time he's having to put up with political maneuverings at the police station where he works and tribulations on the home front. But his one talent of worming out the facts of cases which other detectives have abandoned along with support from his one partner lead him to the facts in a case which has gone cold for years. Interspersed with his narrative are sections told from the point of view of the victim of the crime which fills the reader in on the peril she has been in for years unsuspected by the world at large. Not all of it is completely plausible but that is easily set aside as long as the main bones of the stories are solid. There is some gore here, but not the sexual violence I thought there might be coming.
I liked the setting in Denmark which I visited years ago, a different sort of place in some ways from the other Scandinavian settings of authors this one has been compared to. There is some satire aimed at the expense of Danish culture and national tendencies to liven things up.
