"4��
�� ‘Somebody got him to take those drugs, and I know who it was. That’s what I told the police back then.��

Carl pulled out his notebook. ‘Is that right?�� His inner bloodhound raised its head and sniffed at the wind, catching the scent of something unexpected. He was fully alert now. ‘And who might that be?��

Carl Mørck is an outstanding homicide detective in the Copenhagen Police. We heard his boss tell someone so. Unfortunately, he’s also a nuisance to work with, so when the boss gets a directive to start a new Department Q to investigate cold cases, he knows just the man to put in charge. Carl is getting his own office. It is 2007.

“It was true that a brass plate on the door was engraved with the words ‘Department Q��, but the door itself had been lifted off its hinges and was now leaning against a bunch of hot-water pipes that stretched all the way down the long basement corridor. Ten buckets, half filled and giving off paint fumes, still stood inside the room that was supposed to be his office.��

After twenty-five years with the police, Carl had seen a lot of action and thought he could handle anything. But when he and two of his fellow officers were involved in a shooting that killed one of them and paralysed the other, Carl was shaken. Hardy, an unusually tall man, had been hit and fallen on top of Carl, which completely protected Carl from further shots.

When it was all over, he was questioned about why he remained under Hardy rather than get up and fight back. The reason, of course, was that he couldn’t move, but now, he blames himself for not being able to save his friends. Now he is The Keeper of Lost Causes, in charge of his own department. [The alternative title of the book.]

Chapters move between the current day, 2007, and return to 2001, with background on the missing person, attractive Danish politician Merete Lynggaard. She was a darling of the tabloid press, pretty, popular, and mysterious. Nobody could quite work out what her home life was.

We learn that she lost her parents in a horrific car crash, which also damaged her younger brother, Uffe, so badly that he is mute and badly mentally disturbed. In 2002, she disappeared from the ship that she and Uffe were taking on their annual trip to Berlin. The last anyone noticed her, she and Uffe were standing on deck.

The author tells us early that she is somewhere. This is from the first few paragraphs of the prologue:

“She was going to look after herself. For them she was the woman in the cage, but she was the one who decided how far apart the bars would be. She would think thoughts that opened out on to the world and kept madness at bay. They would never break her.��

Carl spends his time down in Dept Q snoozing with his feet on his desk, forgetting he had asked for an assistant.

“His legs were half asleep as he took them down from the desk and stared at the short, dark man standing in front of him. There was no question that he was older than Carl, or that he hadn’t been recruited from the same peasant kingdom that Carl called home.

‘Assad. OK,�� replied Carl sluggishly. But what the hell did this have to do with him?

‘You are Carl Mørck, as it says outside on the door. I must want to help you, they say. Please, is that correct?��

Carl squinted a bit, weighing all the possible interpretations of what the man had just said. Help him?

‘Yeah, I sure as hell hope so,�� was Carl’s reply.��

Now he will have to get to work. No more snoozing. He and Assad make an interesting odd couple, down in the basement, with Assad finding a small spot for his prayer rug, making exotic teas and foods, and generally confusing Carl, while at the same time asking insightful questions that spark Carl into different lines of inquiry.

I enjoyed the police work and the somewhat touchy relationship between Carl and everyone else, but I found Merete’s chapters very hard.

“She looked towards the glass panes and tried to appear calm. ‘Please, have mercy on me,�� she whispered softly into the darkness.��

It’s a long read. It strayed into the beginnings of side stories that seemed to peter out. Carl is repeatedly told to see a counsellor. He keeps refusing - but finds her sexy. Carl is repeatedly instructed to undertake training for a new title. He refuses each time. He has a stepson and a lodger, who come in and out of several scenes but offer very little to the story. I wondered if these are people who will appear again in the series.

But all in all, I enjoyed it and may follow up with this popular series.
"

"Let's be blunt -- this book is just dreadful. I'd give it -1 star if I could. This review will be spoilery, but since I'm advising you not to touch it with a bargepole, this shouldn't be a problem. How depressing is it that this travesty of history was a massive bestseller.

Alarm bells started to ring on the very first page. A young couple in rural France, she a primary school teacher, he a postman, set off for a picnic with their young daughter. Sitting on the grass, they casually uncork a bottle of vintage Bollinger. I mean, come on! From here on the clichés about France rain thick and fast. I think Hannah must have once been on holiday for a week, and concocted her baguette-carrying, beret-wearing caricature of French people then. Actually maybe not even that; she has two characters called Vianne and Anouk, both rare French names, both featuring in Joanne Harris's saccharine French fancy Chocolat. (Pedant's aside: the name Anouk was not used in France till 1949. The character with this name in the novel was born at least as early as 1900. Similarly, Vianne is an unlikely name for a middle-class couple to give their daughter at that time). On the name front, I had to laugh at the fact that having given Isabelle a fake ID as Juliette Gervaise, the resistants decide her code name for communication should be Nightingale. Since they are speaking French, that's Rossignol. Which is her actual surname. Hiding in plain sight I guess.

I could reel off dozens of anachronisms and historical errors, but several reviewers have already done this. See this review, from a French history teacher to marvel, or rather rage, at the sheer scale of misrepresentation of French history in this ignorant, ill-researched novel. And here's a splendid rant about the writing and plot. Read a few more one-star reviews here, you'll get more. I hardly feel I need to add anything after that.

But: thin, implausible characters. Vianne actually made a slightly more interesting character than our heroine Isabelle, because she at least has doubts and regrets and makes stupid mistakes. Isabelle's activity is frankly implausible. Not her actual actions in saving airmen -- this is based on the true story of Andrée de Jongh, not that Hannah sees fit to mention this anywhere, despite claiming she wants to honour the hidden heroism of women in war. But the fact that she's instantly trusted by members of the resistance despite repeatedly being shown to be impulsive and reckless. She joins them after hearing de Gaulle's name on the radio. Suddenly, without explanation, she becomes committed, serious, and courageous. There's no character development, it just happens. But of course, this is all because of luuuuurve resulting from a single kiss. (A pedant: incidentally, she also develops superpowers. From occupied Paris to Nice or Marseille in the free zone and back, in one day, by train. There were no high-speed trains in those days. She has an amazing memory too. She remembers incidents, places, and faces from a time before her mother died, i.e. when she was under four).

Bonkers plot elements. The small rural village in which Vianne lives is constantly heaving with Nazis busy rounding up Jews, shooting fleeing civilians, and hanging resistants from lampposts. Vianne watches her billeted German officer horsewhipping Jews, including her best friend (yes, of course her only friend is Jewish!), onto cattle trucks and later that same day decides he's a decent guy and she might like a snog. Just days after she's been raped by a bad Nazi, her husband handily comes home having escaped from a German POW camp, so she can pretend the resulting baby is his. After the war, two complete strangers show up on the doorstep and tell her they've come to take her adopted son to his mother's family in the USA. She hands him over instantly because clearly her wartime experiences have taught her to trust everyone she meets.

Incidentally, the origins of the family's wealth are very mysterious. After their mother's death, the sisters' father is wealthy enough to give a large country house, all its contents, and an acre of land to his seventeen-year-old daughter. He himself lives in an apartment near the Eiffel Tower. Meanwhile he sends her younger sister to a series of boarding schools, culminating in two years at a finishing school in Switzerland (during which Isabelle magically learns fluent English despite rarely turning up) -- until she is nineteen. It turns out he runs a shabby little bookshop; it must be a money-laundering operation or something. Similarly, Antoine and Vianne's salaries can't amount to more than say 1500 francs a month, and yet Antoine is able to give Vianne 65,000 francs to hide under the mattress when he goes off to war.

Very poor background research. Hannah doesn't cite a single work of history in her acknowledgements, and I doubt if she read any given her ignorance of, for example, the fact that the Vichy government rounded up and deported Jews on its own initiative, not because it was forced to by the Nazis. She does however thank Tatiana de Rosnay, author of the slightly less awful Sarah's Key for helping to make The Nightingale "as accurate as possible" ::cough::

Oh dear, I think I'd better stop here. Off to my new book group to discuss it ..."

"Unlike All the Light We Cannot See, which won me over despite my initial feeling that just about every book that could be written about WW II already has been, this one really didn't do anything unpredictable, and I bailed out 1/3 of the way through. Interestingly, to me, was that the straw that broke this camel's back was not cruelty to humans or animals but when the Germans decided to tear down all the little walls around the farms, including the lovely stone wall that had been built by the protagonist's grandfather. I stopped reading then.
I didn't read enough to rate the book, but based on what I read it would be about a 2.
NOTE: Added back to TBR after a recommendation from Laura Sullivan."

"A very skilled writer can use the present tense without it being annoying. When something is already dreck, present tense is doubly punishing.

The basic plot outline isn't horrible; David Mamet could have made a good movie out of it. But Lapena's writing and her characters are like sawdust....there's no clever or shocking twist that can redeem any of this.

"Real men read women writers - because of books like this. Trust me," blurbs Lee Child, offending in multiple ways."