The Vanished by Lotte and Soren Hammer

 For the rest of the week Simonsen's investigation made little headway.  The autumn again turned damp and dismal as police officers methodically sifted through the area surrounding Norballe Vandrehjem, comparing summer houses with images photocopied from Kramer Nielsen's photographs.  It was a slow and meticulous business, and one that produced nothing in the way of results.  Klavs Arnold insisted on a second pass, and then another.

--Lotte and Soren Hammer, The Vanished (Bloomsbury, 2011, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken)

In the July 26 New York Times Book Review there was a survey of "Nordic Noir," downbeat detective stories from Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Norway.  I've read many of these authors and the standouts are still Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, who wrote the ten Martin Beck novels that ended in 1975, when Wahloo died, and Henning Mankell, who died in 2015 after publishing eleven Kurt Wallander novels.  These Swedish novelists wrote detective novels that were as much about the political and cultural promises and problems of Sweden as about solving crimes. My most recent reading of this genre is The Vanished, from Denmark.

The hero (or, perhaps, anti-hero) of the Hammers' books is detective Konrad Simonsen, who is getting older and more and more looks back on the sixties and his romance with an activist hippie.  He is relentless in his investigations and doesn't give up until he is completely satisfied about an unusual death and whether it is actually an accident or caused by foul play, following every possible lead.  Simonsen has a daughter, a lover with whom he sort-of lives, and a bunch of neurotic but reliable subordinates.  In The Vanished he investigates the death of a man who has posted pictures of a vanished young girl in his apartment and Simonsen works hard and diligently to find out what happened, while brooding about his own past and future. The novel is especially impressive in its details of the technology now available to law enforcement and the ways in which it is both used and misused.