Dissolved A novel

Blaedel (the Louise Rick series) and Nordbo (the Matthew Cave series) team up for a macabre police procedural set in Nordbo's native village of Tommerup, on the tight-knit Danish island of Funen. Affable police inspector Liam Stark and his brusque middle-aged sergeant, Dea Torp, face a possible missing person case when Claus, the coach of Liam's son's water polo team, demands police mount a search for his vanished wife Charlotte. An enigmatic quotation from the Quran found in Charlotte's bag suggests the involvement of religious extremists, which irks police rookie Nassrin, who's sick of watching fellow people of Arab descent on police surveillance screens. The stakes are raised when new victims start disappearing daily, with enigmatic Quran passages left among their belongings, and Stark and Torp discover horrific video footage depicting some of the crimes. Blaedel and Nordbo cast the net of plausible suspects ever wider, maintaining suspense and keeping readers on the edge of their seats as the plot barrels toward a properly nightmarish conclusion. This is a gruesome Scandi noir success. Agent: Judith Toth, Nordin Agency. (Dec.)

Danish authors Blædel and Nordbo team up to follow the search for a kidnapper who's snatching victims from greater Odense at a truly alarming rate. When Claus Laursen turns up to report that his wife, Charlotte, is missing, Inspector Liam Stark's first impulse is to reassure him: It's only been a few hours, his wife isn't a child, any number of things could have prevented her from picking up her own children. But 3-year-old Oliver Laursen has Down syndrome, and Claus can't believe his wife would've broken the routine Oliver depended on unless she was stopped. When she still hasn't returned the next morning, Stark and his colleagues begin a search, and by nightfall, Kasper, the friend who provided mechanic Dennis Sørenson with an alibi when he was accused some time ago of breaking into Charlotte's house, has also vanished. What particularly troubles the police are the pages left behind with Quran verses condemning particular sins of which different victims are presumably being accused. The abductions continue unabated on a daily basis, eventually encompassing all the sins enumerated by the Ten Commandments--not an idle comparison for Peter Løve, pastor Beate Nielsen's husband and the father of the child she's expecting, since he's laboriously working on a proof that Allah is identical to the Christian God. Readers hoping for a glimpse behind the curtain for an update on the victims should beware of what they wish for, since the fate that awaits the victims is both horrifying and physically revolting. Though the motive is more interesting than the identity of the perpetrator, the co-authors keep up the tension to the end. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.