Imagine if the brooding detective Kurt Wallander from the Henning Mankell series accidentally wandered into the plot of a Stieg Larsson novel and you'd have a pretty good idea of what this book is like. Unfortunately, we don't get a new Salander, but we do get a pretty interesting and flawed character in Carl Morck. 
 Morck is a Danish police detective who survived being shot in the head during an attack that left another detective dead and one paralyzed. While Morck has returned to duty, he's so depressed and wracked by survivor's guilt that he's barely lifting a finger on his cases, and his grumpiness has alienated the other cops. His boss decides to take a sour old shot-in-the-head lemon and make lemonade out of him when national politics force him to create a department to work on high profile cold cases. Morck is 'promoted' to be in charge of the new Department Q and sent down to a basement office. 
 At first, Morck is happy to be left alone in the basement where he can smoke all he wants and play computer solitaire all day, but when he learns that the department is using the money allotted for Department Q to beef up the homicide division, he demands a piece of the action including a department car, getting the basement fixed up and his own assistant to make the coffee and do the shit work. However, he gets more than just someone to answer the phone with Assad, a Syrian immigrant who is curious about the case files. When the political pressure to show some progress mounts, Morck reluctantly ends up looking into the mysterious disappearance of a beautiful female politician, Merete Lynggaard, who vanished five years before. In a parallel story, we learn what happened to Merete and her horrible fate. 
 There was a lot I found intriguing about this book. The Morck character and the set-up of him being exiled to Department Q was an interesting idea, and I really liked this grumpy guilt-ridden detective with a messy personal life. I also loved the dynamic between him and Assad with the bright and curious assistant messing up Morck's plans to sit quietly in the basement and smoke some cigarettes. Assad can read a case file and come up with legitimate deductions and questions, but while he's smart enough to track down a long missing piece of critical evidence, he doesn't know any better than to handle it once he finds it. 
 Unfortunately, Morck's messy personal life seemed to be a bit much after a while. He keeps getting phone calls and giving money to his estranged wife and after a while you just want to scream at him to get a divorce lawyer and change his number. 
 While the circumstances of Merete's abduction and her circumstances are disturbing and horrible, I figured out the villain's motive early in the book so that was pretty obvious. Plus, after a while Merete's predicament starts to go over the top and takes a turn onto Torture Porn Avenue and that's not a neighborhood I like visiting. 
 Still, despite some clunky writing (which could be a translation issue), I liked Morck and Assad, and I found the basic premise intriguing. I've also got a big streak of Danish heritage, but know almost nothing about Denmark so it was fun to soak up a little of the old home country in a better than average crime thriller.