Q2: The Absent One / Disgrace In The Absent One / Disgrace, Jussi Adler-Olsen introduced Detective Carl Mørck, a deeply flawed, brilliant investigator newly assigned to run Department Q, the home of Copenhagen’s coldest cases. The result wasn’t what Mørck – or readers – expected, but by the opening of Adler-Olsen’s shocking, fast-paced follow-up, Mørck is satisfied with the notion of picking up long-cold leads. So he’s naturally intrigued when a closed case lands on his desk: A brother and sister were brutally murdered two decades earlier, and one of the suspects – part of a group of privileged boarding-school students – confessed and was convicted. But once Mørck reopens the files, it becomes clear that all is not what it seems. Looking into the supposedly solved case leads him to Kimmie, a woman living on the streets, stealing to survive. Kimmie has mastered evading the police, but now they aren’t the only ones looking for her – because Kimmie has secrets that certain influential individuals would kill to keep buried … as well as one of her own that could turn everything on its head. Every bit as pulse-bounding as the book that launched the series, The Absent One / Disgrace delivers further proof that Jussi Adler-Olsen is one of the world’s premier thriller writers.
