In January 1944, British pilots James Teasdale and Bryan Young, on a reconnaissance mission near Dresden, Germany, are shot down and escape capture by leaping aboard a train reserved for wounded SS men. Their convincing disguise as German soldiers gets them transferred to Alphabet House, a mental hospital near Freiberg. Staying silent and simulating madness, James and Bryan receive electroshock therapy and experimental drugs. Bryan soon learns how to hide his pills, as well as retain his physical and psychological stamina, while James slowly fades into oblivion. After ten months of plotting, Bryan finally escapes. Thirty years later, Bryan has secured a profitable professional career. James's life remains empty and defeated. Their friendship, too, has been marked by betrayal and abandonment. VERDICT Published for the first time in the United States, crime writer Adler-Olsen's (The Keeper of Lost Causes) 1997 debut was inspired by the experience of the author's father as a senior consultant in psychiatry at numerous mental hospitals in Denmark. But the extensive details of life in an asylum, where playing mental charades was not uncommon during the war, bog down the book's first half. Furthermore, the narrative doesn't introduce enough interaction between Bryan and James at the beginning to convince readers of the special friendship upon which the entire story is based. [See Prepub Alert, 8/18/14.]—Jerry P. Miller. Cambridge, MA

He's the Danish crime king, departing from the Department Q series (e.g., The Purity of Vengeance) with a stand-alone published earlier in Denmark. Shot down over World War II Germany, British pilots James Teasdale and Bryan Young evade escape by hopping a train carrying senior SS soldiers wounded on the eastern front. That lands them at a scary mental hospital called the Alphabet House.

First published in Denmark in 1997, Adler-Olsen's debut is a very different sort of thriller from his Department Q series (The Marco Effect, etc.): it recounts the harrowing odyssey of two British airmen shot down behind enemy lines during WWII and subsequently held captive, under assumed German identities, in a hellish mental hospital for SS officers. Only one of the two can actually speak German, and their struggle to survive electroshock therapy, experimental drugs, and brutal treatment from staff and fellow inmates makes the first half of the book punishing reading. A long-deferred day of reckoning arrives for several characters some 30 years later during the ill-fated 1972 Munich Olympics. Although the daring (if far-fetched) plot, sustained suspense, and caustic view of society all hint at the author's later work, this meticulously researched historical journey won't be to every taste. (Feb.)