In Netflix’s Dept. Q, Matthew Goode plays a prickly homicide detective who’s tapped for a new post: overseeing bleak, long-lost cold cases from a basement office. And as viewers will see, his first assignment is particularly chilling.
The new series (out May 29) is based on Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s series of novels, but the adaptation moves the story from Copenhagen to Edinburgh. As Goode recently told Netflix, “Edinburgh is smaller than Copenhagen, but both are big port cities. [With its] gothic architecture, and it being the judicial center of Scotland, it’s just a really lovely fit.”
While the backdrop may look a little different, you can expect Dept. Q to be just as harrowing as the novel it’s based on. Here’s the book ending and plot summary of The Keeper of Lost Causes, the first book in Adler-Olsen’s series.
A Disturbing Disappearance
After narrowly surviving an attack that killed one colleague and severely injured another, Detective Carl Morck is tasked with overseeing cold cases that call for “special scrutiny.”
Carl — who is at first reluctant to take the job — begins with the case of a young, headline-making politician named Merete Lynggaard, who disappeared five years earlier.
Merete is very close to her brother, Uffe, and she serves as his caregiver since a childhood car accident killed both of their parents and left him with a traumatic brain injury.
While on a ferry with Uffe, Merete is kidnapped and taken to a mysterious cell. She is subjected to torturous conditions, such as increasing air pressure and constant light. Her captors tell her she deserves her fate, but won’t say why. This goes on for several years, until…
The Surprising Dept. Q Book Ending
In the present-day timeline, Carl and his new assistant, Assad, make progress on Merete’s perplexing case. What they discover is shocking: Merete has been held captive by a man, Lasse, and his mother and brother — and they have a haunting connection to her past.
They are the survivors of the car crash that Merete and her family were in decades earlier. Lasse blames Merete for distracting her dad and causing the accident, which killed his dad, younger sister, and one of the twins his mom was pregnant with at the time. (The other, a boy, was born in the wreckage of the crash with life-changing injuries.)
Blaming Merete for the suffering that followed, the family sought to torture and ultimately kill her. Carl and Assad are able to apprehend the family just in time, though Merete’s prognosis is uncertain because of injuries she endured in the depressurization process.
Fortunately, in the book’s final moments, she wakes up from her coma and is finally able to reunite with Uffe.
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