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A review by jmervosh
Marco Effekten by Jussi Adler-Olsen
3.0
"Sometimes police work is like the lottery. You have to hope for a lucky number to come up." Of all the Department Q novels so far, this is the least skillful investigation headed by Inspector Mørck. Distracted by a sputtering love life, annoyed by erratic and eccentric assistants, and frustrated by a new adversarial boss, Mørck can barely bring himself to do any real detective work. If it wasn't for the obsessiveness of his assistants Assad and Rose or the desperation of the child hoping to leave clues to a murder while avoiding capture by both the police and his erstwhile crime family who now want to kill him, Mørck wouldn't have detected a plot at all.
The crime itself is needlessly complicated - an embezzlement scheme run out of the ministry for foreign aid that for some reason uses a family of fake gypsies as muscle at home in Denmark and a roving band of child soldiers as assassins deployed in the field in Africa. The heart of the novel is the boy Marco, whose panic and cleverness is well written and who finds himself in the middle of a number of thrilling action sequences all over urban Copenhagen. These scenes and Assad's endless supply of amusing camel parables are delightful and save what would otherwise be a disappointing installment.
The crime itself is needlessly complicated - an embezzlement scheme run out of the ministry for foreign aid that for some reason uses a family of fake gypsies as muscle at home in Denmark and a roving band of child soldiers as assassins deployed in the field in Africa. The heart of the novel is the boy Marco, whose panic and cleverness is well written and who finds himself in the middle of a number of thrilling action sequences all over urban Copenhagen. These scenes and Assad's endless supply of amusing camel parables are delightful and save what would otherwise be a disappointing installment.