The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen (2011)

A new Scandinavian detective series! This one is from a Danish author, and since I hope to spend a couple of days in Copenhagen next year, great to get a Danish feel for things, though it felt like any other detective story, except for the names, and maybe the pacing of the book. Kemper on Goodreads described it as "Imagine if the brooding detective Kurt Wallander from the Henning Mankell series accidentally wandered into the plot of a Stieg Larsson novel." 

We have another disaffected detective - Carl (pronounced Kaal) Morck, who lost his two partners while working on a case, so he doesn't much care for anything. He has become unbearable at work, but still a very good and intuitive detective, so they create a new Department Q for him - down in the basement, and he asks for an assistant and gets a quirky Syrian - Assad. (Very relevant today, but the book originally came out in 2007, so before our current Syrian refugee crisis.) Their relationship is one of the delights of the book. Department Q is to look into important unsolved cases. Their first case is a missing female government official, presumed drowned off a ferry, but actually kidnapped. It is her back story that goes into the bizarre. There is a rich cast of characters - those in the precinct, Carl's roommates, his estranged wife, government workers, and of course the evil kidnappers.