No Song for the Dead by Jussi Adler-Olsen, Stine Bolther, and Line Holm

Published by Dutton on September 8, 2026

It’s been a minute since I last read a Department Q novel, only because I can’t read everything. I was impressed by the Netflix interpretation of the first Department Q novel and was looking forward to rejoining Jussi Adler-Olsen’s series, but things have changed since my last encounter with the misfit detectives who solve cold cases. New co-authors have manned the laboring oar, making it difficult to know whether Adler-Olsen wrote a word of No Song for the Dead. I credit the co-authors for keeping the tone similar to Adler’s work, even if the series seems to have moved in a new direction.

In Locked In (a book I didn’t read and the last one for which Adler-Olsen receives sole credit), Carl Mørck was framed for a crime and jailed. Despite his exoneration, his career with the police ended. He is now doing a book tour to promote his true crime version of the story told in the first Department Q novel, The Keeper of Lost Causes.

Gordon Taylor has been promoted to the position of sergeant with the North Jutland police. Rose Knudson and Hafez el-Assad are still plugging away, although Rose is even crazier than she used to be, a condition only partly attributable to getting herself knocked up by Gordon in a desperate sexual encounter she now regrets.

New team members have come and gone. In No Song for the Dead, Helena Henry is assigned to work with Rose and Assad. She would rather be assigned to organized crime, where she exceled in France, but the person she was replacing decided not to retire and the only available position is in Department Q. Assad is rather intrigued by Helena while Rose, who likes few people, feels threatened by her. Carl makes an occasional cameo.

The Health and Care Administration once implemented a program that allowed dementia patients to wear a broach fitted with GPS. It allowed caregivers to track them if they wandered off, but it also had an emergency button that the patient could press if she needed help. The program was discontinued but nobody told the broach wearers that the hotline would no longer be monitored. An agency employee recently discovered a recorded message left by a broach wearer. A woman is humming, a man in the background is saying “Help us,” and another man is saying “you don’t want this on your conscience.” The recording ends after the woman screams. The employee's boss, worried about the repurcussions of his decision to end the program, orders her to erase the tape and keep quiet about it.

The employee does some digging and learns that, on the day the emergency call was placed, a caretaker visited the home of her dementia patient, where she found the patient tied to a bed in the basement. The woman had nearly asphyxiated from carbon dioxide but she survived. Four days later, her husband’s body is discovered near a lake, hanging from a boat crane. The press reported the discoveries as an attempted mercy killing followed by a suicide. The dead man had recently been fired as the chairman of a private hospital, perhaps providing a motive for suicide. However, the tape reveals the presence of a third man in the woman’s home, destroying the murder-suicide theory.

The employee made a recording of the tape before she erased it. She brings it to Carl on his book tour. The recording is four years old so Carl gives it to Department Q.

The story follows Assad, Rose, and Helena as they investigate. They discover that a serial killer is at work and that the dead hospital chairman is one of the victims. What ties the killings together is for the reader to discover. The killer’s motivation dates to his dark childhood, which is standard fare for fictional serial killers.

The plot is entertaining if a bit weaker than the early books in the series. The authors develop tension in the relationships of Assad, Rose, and Helena that adds interest to the story. Helena has a dark (albeit contrived) past of her own that she reveals toward the novel’s end. All this struck me as a valiant attempt to keep a series going that had probably sputtered to an end before the new writing team was tasked with reviving it.

Series fans are likely to find some value and a bit of disappointment that this new entry feels like a factory-assembled novel. Readers who are unfamiliar with the series might be better served by reading the first few novels, as this one seems to rehash ground that was well covered by Adler-Olsen.

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Fallow by Sarah Anderson

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 15, 2026

Fallow is a light-hearted examination of surrogacy — and more broadly, the desire of employers to avoid granting maternity or FMLA leave to women who are about to give birth. I chuckled enough to make the book worthwhile, even if its examination of the targeted problem could have been more substantial.

When Fallow begins, Natalie Gallagher is in her early twenties. Natalie doesn’t like to work. Her job history is checkered; she’s probably never earned much more than minimum wage. She scores points for her honest rejection of values like hard work, motivation, and self-sufficiency, even if the absence of those values might make a reader less sympathetic about her self-inflicted woes.

Natalie needs a significant income to pay her student loans but has no desire to earn one. The highlight of her current gig in an HR call center is a guy who repeatedly calls in to complain, in lurid detail, about sexual harassment before masturbating as she repeats the details of the harassment to him. The call center job “confirmed two important truths: that there is no such thing as a good job, and that I had no interest in working. I wanted a life free of wake-up alarms. I wanted no threat of night shifts.” Natalie is lazy but her lack of ambition isn’t surprising, given the dead-end jobs for which she seems destined.

Because the call center job doesn’t pay enough to cover her expenses, Natalie also sells her plasma at the blood bank where her sister works. A nurse there shares an ad with Natalie that promises a generous salary for an applicant who has a “healthy lifestyle,” “birthing hips,” and “discretion.” Those qualifications are sufficiently vague that Natalie decides to apply.

The job turns out to be birth surrogacy. Natalie will be expected to carry another woman’s embryo to term while following a strict diet, exercise regime, and meditation schedule. She gets a bonus for a natural birth. Perks include a tenancy in a furnished luxury condo and a personal assistant who makes sure Natalie sticks to her exercise schedule and doesn’t eat or drink anything that might harm a fetus. A couple of babies will pay off Natalie’s loans. A few more will relieve her of the burden of work for years.

The corporation that hires Natalie makes surrogacy available to high-value female employees who might otherwise take a maternity leave or miss work because of a pregnancy-related illness. With no need for physical recovery, women return to work more quickly — “the goal is to reduce that critical window can from birth to office return.” This seems like an entirely plausible (albeit heartless) scheme to maximize employee productivity. I’m surprised Elon Musk hasn’t thought of it. Perhaps he’s trying instead to develop a robot that will replace birth mothers.

Natalie regards the gig as ideal. As the story moves along, Natalie has several babies. She takes to pregnancy naturally and makes use of the six month “fallow” period between pregnancies to eat unhealthy meals, party until dawn, and have random sexual encounters before she starts to get healthy again. Natalie loves her fallow period and its “three distinct phases: feast, fuck around, and get fertile.”

Natalie forms no particular attachment to the babies she delivers, although one employee spends so much time with her that Natalie believes the woman is sincere when she invites Natalie to spend summers at her home in the south of France. That invitation evaporates when the delivery, through no fault of Natalie, does not go as planned.

Natalie’s last pregnancy involves surrogacy for an executive named Jackie who is extraordinarily clingy. When Jackie loses her job, the corporation expects Natalie to make a choice that will devastate Jackie. The choice Natalie makes changes the course of the novel, starting with Natalie’s kidnapping and her forced residency in a commune. The change of direction sends the story into unexpected territory, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Sarah Anderson skewers corporate employers with her description of Natalie’s draconian contract terms and her NDAs. The novel’s satirical approach to surrogacy as a corporate benefit captures the reality that HR departments are more interested in saving money than in benefiting employees. The problems that pregnant employees encounter in the workplace are serious, but Fallow substitutes eye-rolling satire for a serious examination of pregnancy discrimination. That’s not necessarily a criticism — the novel is meant to be funny, not academic — but readers who hope for a more cogent discussion of the targeted issue might be disappointed.

Anderson also satirizes the sort of people who join communes to avoid the grasp of capitalism, then quarrel about how to make money and share labor. Living in the commune isn’t as nice as living in a luxury condo, although Natalie’s primary objection is that she’s expected to work for her daily meals. Natalie is a bit embarrassed by the sincerity of the commune dwellers, but she has no better option. Or, at least, she doesn’t want to expend the energy that leaving would require.

Fallow worked for me because Natalie, while not quite endearing, manages to make laziness seem like a virtue. Natalie’s ability to ride the waves of life as they wash over her is impressive. Her dedication to making the most of her fallow periods is almost admirable. Natalie does little to fight back when the company that hires her inevitably decides to screw her over, just as she makes little effort to escape when she is kidnapped, but she eventually realizes that she needs to make choices about her life rather than living with the choices that are forced upon her. In the end, Natalie is such a likable character that Anderson had me rooting for her.

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Switzy by Emma Cline

Published  by Random House on September 8, 2026

Switzy is the darkly humorous story of a man who copes with dementia by opting to end his life. Neither dementia nor suicide are funny, but dark humor offers a window into subjects that are difficult to address in fiction. The story is inherently sad but telling a sad story risks encroachment on maudlin territory. Lightening the story with guilty laughter allows the reader to sympathize with the protagonist without making a painful emotional investment in him.

David Hastings is seventy-something. He describes himself as addled. “That was the sort of old-fashioned euphemism. For the stutter in David’s mind. This shuffle of other disappeared things — images, facts, names, stretches of time significant and minor.” He holds onto phrases like “the quick brown fox” as proof to himself that his memory is not entirely gone. But he knows that his condition is worsening and that dementia will eventually rob him of everything — his memories, and with them, his identity.

David resolves to take control of his destiny. He discovers that a painless suicide is not an easy goal to achieve but finds a clinic in Switzerland that will facilitate his desire to die with dignity. Describing the content of letters that he wrote to various people, to be mailed after his death: “It was entirely my own decision, blah blah, signed off by these doctors blah.”

Hastings made some money during his life, for the last few decades as a company CFO. He lost that position after an audit revealed “the budget is off by nearly eight figures,” a discrepancy he was unable to explain. His job has always been to massage numbers, making them bigger or smaller to meet his employer’s needs, but he no longer understands account entries he doesn’t remember making.

David’s friend Stearns gave him another, less demanding position and let things slide until David noticed that people “were mad at him and he didn’t know why. He had missed a certain meeting — important. An important meeting! People avoided his eyes.” David coasted on his reputation for as long as possible, but even Stearns realizes he’s no longer capable of working.

“David had worked so frantically. Needless, his frantic work. And yet — they were all like him. Stearns and the others. Why did any of them fill their lives in this way? He had not needed to work as much, not nearly as much, and not with a feeling of such terror.” Through David, Emma Cline reminds us how sad it is that only on the last leg of our journey do we understand how misguided our priorities have been.

In one telling passage, Cline writes: “Everyone he knew had some sense of the unsatisfactory shape that their life had taken, bad decisions, a crucial opportunity that had been discarded. But choices that seemed, in retrospect, to be significant — they rarely were.”

Cline’s warning — that we should not wait for death to approach before we understand what in life is truly important — has value, but many books have made that same point. Fortunately, the novel works on other levels, as well. David has been tormented for years about his sexual desire for his oarding school friend Tom. They had an encounter, but David stood silently by while other students pulled a horrifying prank on Tom.  David wants to speak to Tom about his desire and guilt, but Tom, now married with children, has little desire to revisit the past — even if David were capable of coherent conversation.  

One recipient of David’s last letters will be his daughter Rebecca. He has concealed his dementia from her — she thinks he retired but has a consulting gig in Zurich — and continues to do so, substituting meaningless phrases for meaningful discussion, when he meets her for dinner in London before leaving for Switzerland. That we can drift so far from people we should love is another tragedy that Cline uses David's ordinary life to illustrate.

The story also has mysterious moments. David has two caregivers, but the one who is with him during his trips to London and Switzerland is Cody. David can’t always remember Cody’s name but refers to him as “the boy.” David is concerned that Cody is stealing from him (he has that concern about nearly everyone) but feels powerless to do anything to stop it. From time to time, the novel hints that Cody’s relationship to David is something more than a hired servant, even if David can't remember what it might be.

Cline’s writing style mimics David’s disintegrating mind. Phrases trail off, leaving thoughts unfinished. White space between thoughts represent the gaps in David’s train of thought. The text meanders, connecting disparate moments and distracted thoughts in ways that are meaningful only to David’s wandering mind. The text is remarkably effective in placing the reader inside David’s head.

The novel’s ambiguities, including Cody’s actual role in David’s life, might frustrate readers, but the ambiguity helps the reader understand what it is like to be David — a person who has lost confidence, who no longer understands what is expected of him. In the novel’s funniest scene, David is baffled by a naked woman who wants to seduce him. He simply has no idea how to respond.

The story is moving, while the dark humor keeps it from becoming oppressive. I suspect that many readers — like me — fear dementia more than we fear death. I applauded David’s resolve even as I was horrified by the assisted but uncoerced steps he took to end his life. I suspect that Switzy left an impression that will haunt me forever.

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Happy Labor Day!

Engines of Reason by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by tordotcom on September 1, 2026

Engines of Reason is a sequel to Elder Race. The story will probably make little sense to readers who aren’t familiar with the first book.

Earth colonized a number of planets before it collapsed. After Earth recovered, its anthropologists visited the colonized planets. Nyr is an anthropologist on the planet Sophos 4, whose inhabitants have forgotten their origin. The local governments are primitive and the largest one is ruled by a dynasty.

Nyr lives in a tower that communicates with an orbiting satellite, but he hasn’t heard from Earth in quite a long time. Prior to Elder Race, he spent most of his time sleeping and waiting for instructions from an Earth that might again have collapsed. In Elder Race, Nyr saves Sophos 4 from someone who has discovered how to activate machines from Earth and use them for destructive ends. Because Nyr can control monstrous technology, he is viewed as a wizard.

Engines of Reason picks up the story many years after Elder Race ends. A young woman who implored Nyr to help her in Elder Race learned some secrets of his wizardry but disregarded his jealous advice not to marry a lout. Nyr and Lyn have been estranged ever since, but they reunite when Sendra appears, claiming to be a wizard.

Sendra is a charlatan, but the person who empowered him with the secrets of technology — Ilmoth the Elder — seems to be Nyr’s equal. Ilmoth is determined to conquer (or destroy) Sophos 4, and Nyr will need to team with Lyn and her daughter Sara to save the planet.

Taken together, Elder Race and Engines of Reason impress me as some of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s best work. The theme of an undeveloped society mistaking technology for magic is nicely developed, the relationship between Nyr and Lyn is complex, and the mystery of Ilmoth’s ability to control technology adds a new dimension to the story. The theme of self-sacrifice that made Nyr such an endearing character in Elder Race is reinforced in the sequel.

Science fans who haven’t read Elder Race might want to pick up that book and follow it with the sequel. Fans of the first novel will likely enjoy Engines of Reason as a tasty new treat.

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