This article contains spoilers for Netflix’s Dept. Q .

Thrillers and murder mysteries often get knocked for neglecting character and style in favor of plot, but the opposite is the case with the new Netflix series Dept. Q, based on a series of books by the Danish crime novelist Jussi Adler-Olsen. Created by Scott Frank—whose adaptation of Walter Tevis’ The Queen’s Gambit applied the same elegant attention to a far superior novel — Dept. Q is beautifully shot, smartly written, and replete with fine performances, all in service of a rather stupid story.

Adler-Olsen’s bestselling but decidedly mid novel series, beginning with 2007’s The Keeper of Lost Causes , features a surly Copenhagen police detective, Carl Mørck, who is assigned to a new cold case department after he i

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