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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