Dept. Q

A top-rated detective, Carl Morck, returns to work following a shooting incident in which he was badly wounded, his colleague and friend James Hardy was paralysed and a uniformed police office was killed. He receives a muted welcome as he is regarded as arrogant and appears to look down on his colleagues. He has to undergo therapy for the after-effects of the shooting.

The Scottish Government has decided it would be politically expedient to temporarily concentrate on unsolved crimes to improve poor detection rates. Accordingly, Morck’s hard-pressed and under-resourced commander, Moira Jacobson, is offered a substantial budget to set up a new department to this end. She prefers to use most of the budget for her own department and current cases, so she assigns Morck as the sole officer dealing with a large number of cold cases and he is given a semi-derelict basement office.

A civilian employee, Akram Salim. a former Syrian policeman looking for more challenging work, quietly insinuates himself into Morck’s basement. Given the task of categorising the cold cases, he presents Morck with what he regards as the best prospect and they begin to build a team of misfit officers dedicated to cracking seemingly impossible cases.