Victim 2117 is the latest in Jussi Adler-Olsen's very successful Department Q series. and fans who have all along known that there's more to the enigmatic Assad will be shocked at quite how much more. For a start...................,sorry but you'll have to read the book,no spoilers here .
Teasing apart Assad's past plays a key part in this story and news reports of the death of a refugee (reported as the 2117th to die in the Mediterranean)begin a series of events that escalate into an incident threatening massive loss of life with Assad's nemesis pulling the strings.
The news reports also push a rather unbalanced young man called Alexander into full-scale madness and while some members of Department Q are helping Assad deal with the ghosts of his past others are being taunted by the increasingly unhinged Alexander as he threatens to avenge "Victim 2117". Personally I didn't find his motivation overly convincing .
This is a good read for Department Q fans, it could be read as a standalone but without knowing Assad's history in the group and past events with other characters you wouldn't get as much out of the book as those who have been following the series.
One regular character moves on while 2 old favourites re-join the cast of characters and overall it's a good read but not the best in the series . The core of the book,Assad's story,was great, the other thread less convincing, not least a missed clue that was blindingly obvious,except apparently to a crack team of Denmark's finest Detectives.

Thanks to Jussi Adler-Olsen, Quercus Books and Netgalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Quercus Books for an advance copy of Victim 2117, the eighth novel to feature Copenhagen’s inspector Carl Monck and his bunch of misfits in Department Q.

When a dead refugee is washed ashore in Cyprus she becomes known as Victim 2117, as she is the 2117th to die at sea. Her fate inspires washed up Catalan journalist, Joan Aiguader, to try and identify her and her journey. She inspires a murderous plot in Copenhagen teen Alexander’s mind. She inspires hope in Assad, a member of Department Q, because he knows who she and her travelling companions are.

After a slow start I thoroughly enjoyed Victim 2117. I don’t want to sound unfeeling but it starts as yet another refugee story and my heart sank. I find the fate of these poor people too heartbreaking and serious to be fictionalised by anyone who hasn’t lived through their experiences. Nevertheless the author makes a good stab at it before turning the novel into a terrorism thriller which is exciting, tense and riveting.

The two plot lines, international terrorism and Alexander’s attempted mayhem at home in Copenhagen, run alongside each other with Carl and Assad handling the terrorists and the other team members, Rose and Gordon, dealing with Alexander. I found both interesting in different ways. Both deal with an unnamed threat where Rose and Gordon are seeking to identify Alexander while Carl and Assad know who they’re dealing with, a figure from Assad’s past called Ghaalib, but don’t know his endgame. As the novel is told from various points of view the reader has far more information than the Police which would normally annoy me but in this case just whets the appetite for where it’s all leading.

The novel reveals much of the mysterious Assad’s background and it is, at points, very difficult to read. The cruelty is barbaric but, unfortunately, all too believable. Survival is not always a happy ending.

Victim 2117 is a good read that I have no hesitation in recommending.

How wonderful the department Q books are, and this the 8th in the series is just as good as its predecessors. Although it can be read as a stand-alone it would mean a whole lot more if you have read the others so you understand the main characters and how they relate to each other.
We all thought Assad was this funny man who mixed his English up, made smelly brews and had a prayer mat in the office. It comes as somewhat of a surprise to find out he speaks several languages, is a sharpshooter and ex soldier.
When the 2117th refugee is found dead after trying to cross the Mediterranean it is assumed she drowned. When it is discovered she was stabbed and her photo goes International, Assad realised he knew her, she was a big part of his earlier life. Linked to this is a fanatical maniac who is seeking revenge on Assad and has hatched a crazy plot to blow up many people in Germany, including Assad’s family of whom he had no knowledge and had assumed were dead already.
Thrown into the mix is a troubled young many who uses Victim 2117 as someone he wants to avenge and when he has reached level 2117 on his computer game he will kill his parents and anyone he encounters on the streets.
As always a riveting thriller, tight plot and believable characters.

Let me begin by saying that I'm a huge fan of Jussi Adler-Olsen's "Department Q" series and I've read all the installments as well as seen all the movie adaptations starring Nikolaj Lie Kaas as Carl Mørck and Fares Fares as Assad. I enjoyed each and every one of them and I was thrilled to see that I was approved for a free ARC from the publisher (Quercus) through Netgalley. Unfortunately, Victim 2117 doesn't have the same effect on the reader as the previous books did and the ending left me with a bitter taste, trying to pinpoint the possible reasons that this installment is so out of synch with its predecessors in terms of both plot and characterization. All the readers love the Department Q team in the Copenhagen police force, a special investigative sector that reopens cold cases in order to examine possible errors and omissions in the original investigation, etc. Initially, the team consisted of Carl and Assad and then came Rose and Gordon to add their quirkiness and brilliance in solving impossible godforsaken cases from the past. All those characters have set their own distinctive mark in the Nordic crime literature map of detective-protagonists and their sidekicks. In an interview he gave to Barry Forshaw, Jussi Adler-Olsen said that the series will be completed in ten installments and from #7 (The Scarred Woman) he focused on each main character separately as follows: #7 will be Rose's story, #8 will put Assad in the spotlight, #9 will revolve around Carl and his sense of guilt while the tenth and last one will be the "fireworks" completing one of the most brilliant Nordic noir crime novel series.

Thus, Victim 2117 is centered around the character of the mysterious and solemn Assad who always preferred to change the topic of discussion when asked about his past. From the first few pages of the novel, we learn that Assad's real name is Zaid al-Asadi and he was born in Iraq, not in Syria as he was claiming until now. His past is inextricably tied to Iraq, the notorious prison of Abu Ghraib, the resistance against Saddam Hussein's regime and the Danish Intelligence Services where he was employed some years after he settled permanently in Denmark. The reader also learns the reason why Assad seems to bear a deep unuttered sadness. His family, his wife Marwa and two daughters Nella and Ronia, are captives to a brutal sadist named Ghaalib, the main villain/antagonist in this book, who has a score to settle with Assad from many years before. The story begins when a boat with refugees from war-torn Syria reaches the shores of Cyprus and one woman is drowned in the process. Her photographs are all over the press and when Assad sees her face in the newspaper during a visit to Rose's apartment, he is shocked as he recognizes the woman who was a kind of guardian angel to him during his childhood. Then he will be even more dumbfounded when he realizes that the two women that stand beside the dead woman in the photograph are his long-lost wife and one of his daughters. Assad approached a nervous meltdown and he will be forced to confess to Carl, Rose, and Gordon the truth about his past in the Middle East and with their help he will attempt to find his arch-nemesis, Ghaalib, and rescue his family, or more accurately the remnants of his family.

This is the main story of the novel, but, as always in the "Department Q" novels there are plenty of subplots which in turn are interwoven with the central plotline. I found those subplots to be the weakest aspect of this novel. We follow the perspective of a young journalist working for a newspaper in Barcelona who searches for Ghaalib and investigates his connection with possible forthcoming attacks in Germany and other European countries. In another one we are introduced to Alexander, a truly grotesque and implausible character, who lives a secluded life in his house, never leaving his room and computer screen for any reason. Driven by his mental disease(s), Alexander hatches an insane plan that involves massive murder of random people with the use of a samurai sword (!). I found Alexander's story unbearable and obnoxious as the author simply wanted to add an extra character to richen the narrative or some other reason. The character's motivation is so farfetched and flimsy that makes you wonder why on earth such an experienced and talented crime writer as Adler-Olsen was determined to include that sub-story in one of his works.

I should also add that there is a nearly total absence of humor in Victim 2117, something that surprised me in a rather negative manner, as I was used to the classical camel jokes made by Assad and Carl's cynical and misanthropic comments and remarks. Perhaps this is due to Assad's tragic predicament in this book that doesn't leave space for a lighter tone. Furthermore, the author chooses not to use flashbacks that were a very common narrative trope in the previous installments. Instead, we follow multiple perspectives from both protagonists and antagonists/villains that unfold at the same time in the present day. I don't know what went so wrong with Victim 2117 and it is the first time that a book written by the Danish master of crime fiction lets me down. I hope that it will be nothing more than a parenthesis and the next one (#9) will be reminiscent of the series' overall excellence. My precise rating would be 2,5/5.