Dead souls don't sing

They took everything from him. So now he's gonna take everything from them. One by one. After leaving the police force, Carl Morck can't adjust to his new role as a writer, so he is quite welcoming when an unknown woman contacts him with a disturbing recording. Its contents will shed light on a years-old, supposedly closed case - the stuff of Department Q, where the return of a criminal ace to action would be most welcome. In the meantime, Rose and Asad are doing everything they can to convince their superiors that their special unit still has an indispensable place in the Copenhagen police. The arrival of a fresh reinforcement, the Danish-French organised crime specialist Helena, doesn't make things any easier - while Asad is unnerved by the presence of a strong and determined policewoman, Rose, struggling with health problems, sees her as a dangerous competitor, quite possibly even the commander's informer. Neither of them knows that their new colleague is hiding a dark secret from them. After ten novels, Danish bestselling author Jussi Adler-Olsen entrusts a highly successful Nordic crime series to a pair of female writers. Line Holm and Stine Bolther give chilling testimony to the lengths to which child bullying can go in the eleventh case of Department Q. "The authors have taken on Denmark's most beloved criminal heritage. And they lived up to all expectations." - Politiken "Jussi Adler-Olsen and his two new co-authors, Line Holm and Stine Bolther, they have surpassed all expectations and brought an old successful series into a new era... The female traces are evident in the text and bring a fresh wind, without the series losing its distinctive character." - Berlingske The article described, how a home carer entered a villa on Emdrupgardsvej in north-west Copenhagen on Sunday evening, 10 November 2019, and found its occupant, an elderly woman suffering from dementia, chained to a bed in the basement. The woman, Jette Horsten, was barely breathing, and it was no wonder why. In the corner of the basement room was a charcoal grill full of still warm coals. She was lucky that the fire went out before the escaping carbon monoxide could poison her. The victim herself was not much help to the investigation, unable to speak coherently, but four days later, on Thursday 14 November 2019, her husband's body was found near Lake Fureso in northern Sjalland. The husband - Ole Horsten, the recently dismissed chairman of the board of Charis private hospital - committed suicide by hanging himself from a ship's crane. The conclusion was, of course, immediately obvious: The removal from the prestigious board position drove the 76-year-old man to suicide, and since his demented wife could not do without him, he decided to take her with him. "So-called widespread suicide," Carl growled. "The newspapers called it a mercy killing. And this conclusion was accepted by everyone - family, former colleagues and the police. Everyone believed it was his work." Gry's voice shook. "But when you listen to this record..." Carl put his glasses down. "Yes, then something is wrong," he said. "The couple was not alone in the house at the time. There was a third person." - excerpt from the book