LOCKED IN

DCI Carl Mørck, last seen headed for the hoosegow in The Shadow Murders (2022), struggles to figure out who’s trying to kill him in jail before they succeed.

Carl, the founder and leading light of Department Q, the Copenhagen PD’s cold case unit, has been implicated in an ancient drug case but not yet found guilty of anything when the attempts on his life begin. Ironically, his court-appointed attorney, Adam Bang, turns out to have an even shorter shelf life than his beleaguered client. Moved finally to do something to protect the headline investigator, the authorities transfer Carl from Vestre Prison to Slagelse Remand Center along with Malthe Bøgegård, the fellow inmate who’d saved his life because he didn’t want to lose the commission he’d accepted to kill Carl himself. Things are equally active outside the penal system. Eddie Jansen, a corrupt Rotterdam cop who’s been called to account by his crooked higher-ups, goes on the lam with his wife and daughter, leaving a trail of violent near-misses in his wake. The discovery of DKNL Transport owner Hannes Theis dead in a van marks the beginning of a related murder spree. All the while, Carl’s Department Q colleagues Assad, Rose, and Gordon ignore orders from their own higher-ups, who are either indifferent or complicit, in their attempts to identify the assassins’ paymaster before the next attempt on Carl’s life succeeds. There’ll be a head-spinning number of references to some of Department Q’s earlier cases and endless attempts to relitigate some of those cases. Perhaps the most urgent question: Can you tell the players without a program?

Readers new to this bestselling franchise are advised to start anywhere but here.