Veteran crime queen Sara Blaedel (A Harmless Lie; The Drowned Girl) teams up with Mads Peder Nordbo (Cold Fear) in the creepy and enthralling Dissolved. A young mother goes missing after her morning workout, and her distraught husband can't get the local Danish police to begin an investigation until precious time has already passed. A second resident goes missing shortly afterward while his grandmother waits at his apartment. An elderly man vanishes while walking his dog. And so it continues. There seems to be no connection between the victims, other than that they have all received a note bearing some kind of religious verse, initially thought to be from the Quran, that might hint at why they have been targeted.
Detectives Liam, Dea, and Nassrin (the latter a relative newcomer to the police force) all have a personal stake in the number of people who go missing from their town--and that list comes ever closer to home. Nassrin grows increasingly frustrated at the all-too familiar ways in which the Muslim community, which includes her family, always seems to be among the first under suspicion. Soon, hidden conflicts come to the surface among the police officers.
Blaedel and Nordbo carefully establish the relationships and tension in the first part of the book and then quicken the pace in an all-out race to solve the case and salvage whatever they can from the clutches of a criminal whose level of cruelty is shockingly novel. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.