Jussi Adler-Olsen started a wonderful Danish detective series with The Keeper of Lost Causes, The First Department Q Novel. It’s not unusual for a mystery series to start with a discredited and morbidly confused detective, but Carl Morck is truly distinctive. His personal and professional baggage is overwhelming, yet he carves out his space and moves forward. Morck’s contempt for most of the people in the police department, is both hilarious and near-suicidal, but he makes it work. I’ve always been a fan of watching discredited people make the system work for themselves. The way Morck tortures the people who are trying to torture him is inspired and very funny. Less funny is the guilt Morck suffers in connection with a prior case that left his partner completely incapacitated. Along the way, there is a mysterious yet oddly engaging assistant with an apparently gruesome past, a new love interest for Carl who has no idea what to do with it and the kind of dark underlying mysteries that happily characterize so many great Scandinavian crime novels.

This is no standard example of the Scandinavian crime genre. Adler-Olsen has created something wonderfully new. I think I’ve read a total of three Department Q mysteries, but this is the first and it sets the stage brilliantly for the novels to come. Carl is the kind of protagonist who lacks all social skills, and I couldn’t help loving him. Carl’s back story and the other characters created by Adler-Olsen are truly inspired and provide ample fuel for additional books in this series, and I now absolutely have to read all of them.