Black Notice

Elegant, trumpet-like lilies, she thought. But there was something off. Something not right. It was the color. It was strange, sort of pale and flesh-colored... In a sleepy seaside town outside Copenhagen, a strange light at the bottom of the harbor has the police call in a military diver with a speciality in wet crime scenes. Deep down in the dark water sits a car with the dead body of a young woman in the driver’s seat. She has a long cut in her lower abdomen.

At a loss to figure out the identity of the Norwegian wetsuit victim, the police send out a notice though Interpol — a black notice. At the same time, it becomes clear that this young woman’s death is somehow linked to the murder that Felix and Kathrine are investigating.

When a woman bearing a scar similar to the others is found lifeless and icy cold in a forest lake north of Copenhagen, she could be the most important witness for the police — if only they are able to bring her back from the dead.

A couple of old yearbooks from a school in a posh suburb north of Copenhagen show a boy who looks eerily similar to the man with the strange eyes. But with the rest of Europe’s police focusing on border crossings and refugee camps, Felix is now on his own. He believes that the killer has a medical background, perhaps even an employee of Denmark’s largest hospital, Rigshopitalet, where the first victim worked and where the comatose woman was treated. Felix’s deputy Kathrine tries to convince him to let her go to the hospital as a decoy.

When Kathrine is kidnapped, the police quickly arrest a suspect. But when it becomes clear that they’ve got the wrong man, Felix Jørgensen goes after a gynecologist with a suspended medical license. The tracks lead the investigator to a seemingly abandoned house in rural Lolland in southern Denmark. Is Kathrine in the house? Does the murderer know about their trap? And will Felix manage to save his deputy from becoming yet another victim of this madman’s scalpel? Or is it all much too late? Black Notice is a crime story told in five parts.