Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Locked In by Jussi Adler-Olsen

 

(hb; 2023, 2024: tenth book in the Department Q series. Translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight.)

 

From the inside flap

“On the day after Christmas, head of Department Q Detective Carl Mørck finds himself handcuffed in a police car headed for Copenhagen’s Vestre Prison. After fifteen years, a violent case from his past has caught up with him. Charges of drug trafficking and murder threaten to destroy his life and career. Buthe is being framed. Someone has a million-dollar bounty on his head to make sure he doesn’t talk, putting him in grave danger among the prison’s incarcerated criminals and corrupt officers. The question that remains is: Why?

“Carl’s colleagues at the Copenhagen Police Department instantly turn their backs on him, leaving the ever-loyal Department Q team as his only hope. In search of answers, Rose, Assad, and Gordon must disobey direct orders from way up the chain of command to try to unravel the case. With only one another to trust and Carl’s battle against the unknown mastermind’s henchmen worsening by the day, they must work faster than ever before if they are to clear his name—and save his life.”

 

Review

Locked keeps with its predecessor novels’ slick, entertaining police procedural thriller execution, with well-written characters worth hissing at or rooting for (or somewhere in between), making for a deft suspense and action book worth not only reading but owning. Not only that, Mørck’s high-tension dilemma directly deals with  events that led to the formation of Department Q, and a series entry that will decide Mørck’s immediate, life-or-death fate—as well as the fate of this overall series. Great, wild-ride of a mainstream police procedural.


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