Book Summary- The Marco Effect (J A Olsen)

Jussi Adler-Olsen’s fifth novel in the Department Q series, under the “leadership” of Copenhagen Detective Carl Morck, continues the story of Morck and his unconventional assistants who operate out of a basement office dedicated to the solution of cold cases.A victim of PTSD from a case in which he was wounded by a nail gun, with one of his men left paralyzed from the neck down and another one killed, Morck has been consigned to the basement, out of the way of the rest of the Copenhagen Police Department, which keeps him on only because they need the money which Parliament has granted for the cold cases that Morck’s department investigates.An alcoholic loner, Morck has hired as his assistants two other loners with problems and mysteries associated with them. A man from the Middle East named Hafez-el-Assad, a name he shares with the former President of Syria, has an almost instinctive ability to discover connections between casesand to obtain information.Rose, who started as a secretary and who is famous for her piercings, has gradually progressed into case work.None of the three in Department Q fear the wrath of the higher-ups or care what anyone else thinks.

The Marco Effectbegins obliquely.A man from a Baka village of pygmies in Cameroon, Louis Fon, is working with a Danish bank which funds development work in this rural, remote area.After receiving a cellphone call in the jungle, he realizes that his discovery of funding irregularities puts his life at risk, and he has only enough time to type out a message (which is unreadable) before he is attacked.Further development of this plot line shows the massive corruption of the funding bank in Denmark, and the administrators in Cameroon who are responsible for using the funds for the betterment of the rural Baka area.The bank, in danger of closing, has found a way to “recycle” the funding from Denmark to Cameroon and then back to the Danish headquarters and to the officers of the company. The novel moves back and forth in time, with information parceled out carefully to maintain as much suspense as possible.Other deaths soon occur.

A second plot line takes place inCopenhagen, where a group of gypsies, mostly children, under the leadership of a sadistic and violent “spiritual” leader, roam the streets, picking pockets, begging, and doing petty crimes in order to meet their monetary quota each day.Marco, one of the young men still in his early teens, publicly challenges the leader, his own uncle, and, as a result, finds himself running for his life. Marco has dreams of college, of becoming a doctor, and of being successful, though he is not allowed to attend school, and his frantic efforts to avoid being caught by his uncle and a loose confederation of gypsy groups throughout Europe keep the suspense high.

A third subplot concerns a cold case in which a woman is killed in the explosion of the houseboat on which she lives, and questions arise as to whether this is an insurance scam, a murder by her husband, or some other kind of crime.As always seems to be the case with police departments as they are depicted in crime novels, interdepartmental rivalries and jealousies threaten Morck and his assistants.As each of these plot threads unspools, the question of how, if at all, these threads will connect becomes a paramount interest for the reader.

Though nearly all crime thrillers rely on coincidence to some extent, the coincidences in this novel especially strain credulity.In the first twenty pages, the first of these appears, as a man from Sweden, who has no other role in the novel, spontaneously offers to use his talents to help decode the last message of Louis Fons in Cameroon for a man from the Copenhagen bank. Later Marco, with a part-time job putting up and then taking down posters, miraculously comes across the photo of a man to whom he is unexpectedly connected, a photo posted several years ago.And an even greater coincidence occurs when Rose, at a local café, sees exactly the same photo and finds that it provides her with information as important to her as it has been to Marco.The most unlikely coincidence of all occurs when a magazine is found inside a house which has been closed for a couple of years, and, surprise, it is a magazine to which someone has subscribed and therefore has the person’s name and, more importantly, address on it.An unusual coincidence involving a secret connection between Assad and another person working in the police department raises even more questions about the legitimacy of using coincidence to resolve plot issues.