One early Monday morning before school begins, two children make a gruesome discovery: In the school’s gymnasium, they find the bodies of five naked and heavily disfigured men. They are hanging from the gymnasium ceiling placed with mathematical precision. It looks like a public execution. For Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen and his team from the Homicide Division in Copenhagen, the case is a puzzle.
As the disfigured men are gradually identified, Simonsen realises that the motive behind the murders is regular vigilantism and that the victims are all paedophiles so, despite already having an awful relationship with the press, he tries to put a lid on the case to prevent the sensationalist press whipping up public opinion. But without success. Behind the bestial killings is a small group of “avengers”, all victims of paedophile attacks. In a carefully orchestrated campaign, the group feed the press as well as the public with emails, newspaper advertisements and video recordings of the executions, with the goal of directing attention to the mild sentencing practice towards paedophiles. And neither the press nor the politicians are slow in following the demands from the court of public opinion for heavier punishment. But then another spectacular murder is committed, Konrad Simonsen comes under pressure from all sides, not least when he receives photos of his daughter Anna Mia, sent by the now deceased Per Clausen.
The Hanging is an effective crime story about taking the law into one’s own hands, a tale of manipulation and demagoguery.
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“There is a price for everything.” Thus begins the second installment of Hammer & Hammer’s explosive crime series featuring Copenhagen police investigator Konrad Simonsen; a sentence that simultaneously strikes the theme of the nerve-wrenching follow-up to The Hanging.
Following a sensational opener in which the German Chancellor stumbles upon the corpse of a young woman while on a fact-finding trip to Greenland’s ice-cap, Konrad Simonsen is dispatched to the Arctic to sort things out. The woman, Maryann Nygård, turns out to have been murdered a quarter of a century before, and for Simon, the killer’s MO brings back memories of a previous case, memories he’d rather be without. Not only are there remarkable similarities between the two victims and the manner in which they were killed, this new case moreover provides incontestable evidence that Konrad’s previous main suspect was innocent. Small comfort in view of the fact that he committed suicide ten years previously, just as he was about to be detained. The realisation that he drove an innocent man to his death deals another blow to the hardened policeman’s already failing health.
Prompted by the similarities between the two murders, Konrad and his team start probing into other cases in which women of the same age and appearance have been reported missing, only to discover that the case reaches far wider than they had ever imagined.
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Set in Copenhagen in August 2008. Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen returns to the Homicide Division in Copenhagen after a severe heart attack. Due to his health, he gets assigned a low priority case concerning a postman, Jørgen Kramer Nielsen, whose death at first sight seems to be an accident, but new forensic evidence points towards murder. Konrad Simonsen finds, as the case and Nielsen’s life begin to unravel, a link to an English girl who disappeared during six Danish high school students’ reading period back in 1969. The event has left deep traces in the students, including the postman, who converted to Catholicism. This problematizes the investigation as Nielsen’s pastor, bound to confidentiality, knows a lot more about the young girl's disappearance than he is telling.
The case triggers Konrad Simonsen's urge to look back on his own youth – something he has had an urge to do after his surgery. His first real love, the left-wing flower child, Rita, who met Konrad as a young officer in 1970’s Copenhagen, constantly returns to his thoughts – irritating his girlfriend.
Pauline Berg has also returned to the Homicide Division after a vicious kidnapping the year before. She works closely with Konrad, while Arne Pedersen, as temporary Chief Inspector, tries to pull together the threads after a violent shooting at a Copenhagen school. A shooting, whose victims seem to have some sort of connection to the deceased Jørgen Kramer Nielsen.
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One day in early spring a small group of people are driving a dark blue Audi to a remote hunting cottage in a forest north of Copenhagen. In the car is a young African woman, a prostitute. The woman is not delivering to the clients, as she is expected to, and must therefore be punished. But the brutal punishment goes terribly wrong, and when the young woman dies, her body is hidden in a nearby lake.
Only by coincidence her remains are found by a straying hunting dog. No one knows who she is and no one has reported her missing. After months of fruitless investigation by the local police the case is handed over to Konrad Simonsen. Konrad and his team follow the few leads from the unknown girl, and it soon turns out that she is the key to a world of trafficking, prostitution and violence. A world where everything comes with a price and no mistakes go unpunished. A world where the upper class is deeply connected to human trafficking. And where everyone knows how to keep a secret. Konrad’s investigation leads them to suspect the manager of the nearby manor house, who turns out to be linked to several gruesome – and unsolved – cases of assault and rape. But there is a lot more to the case and the investigation is turned upside down when a young, beautiful woman suddenly appears to play a central part. Her name is Benedikte Lerche-Leth, she was also in the car that day where the young African woman was killed – and she has her very own agenda. The Girl in the Lake is the fourth novel in the series by Hammer & Hammer, and is a story about ice-cold cynicism and contempt of human life.
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On a hot summer day a Copenhagen canal tour boat catastroph cally collides with the Oslo boat in the harbour of Copenhagen. During the rescue of the many dead bodies it soon turns out that not everyone died from drowning. Four of the passengers were murdered.
Konrad Simonsen and his team are put on the spectacular case, whitch hits the very core of the group. The crime is quickly linked to a young woman’s death a few years earlier. A death which no one in the police found suspicious, except for the young detective Pauline Berg who determinedly tried to solve it – with fatal consequences.
The investigation of the case tracks back to a secret mission in Bosnia in 1995, in which Danish UN soldiers were involved. To solve the case it is crucial that The Homicide Division gets help from the Danish veterans, but many of them only wants to forget and have their own demons to fight.
Konrad Simonsen sees only one solution. He himself must travel to Bosnia in hope of finding an answer. However others have a whole different agenda for his trip.
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One cold February day, a four-year girl is kidnapped from a kindergarten. The girl is the granddaughter of the Deputy National Commissioner of Police and Konrad Simonsen reluctantly takes on the case. Two days later the girl is found murdered – strangled – in an elevator shaft in a block of flats in the suburb of Bellahøj. Three days after the first murder, two teenagers are kidnapped; one of them is the daughter of a police officer. A disturbing pattern begins to emerge: someone is deliberately, and exclusively, harming police employees and their families. Konrad Simonsen has nothing to go on. No one can predict when the perpetrator will strike next and fear is spreading like wildfire among his closest colleagues. In the meantime, the Man and his assistant are planning their next move ...

THE REVENGE is a well-turned, intense and dramatic page turner about revenge and vigilantism, and about how far we will go to protect ourselves and our own.

A Finnish arsonist with several fires and one death on his conscience has been convicted of setting a fire he almost certainly hasn't caused. The Head of the Department at the Justice Ministry discreetly hires Konrad Simonsen to investigate the case.
The case i knottier than first expected: not only has it been classified by the government's security committee and handed over to the secret service, but it seems that no one is interested in reopening the case.

An eleven-year-old girl vanishes without trace in a small town in rural Denmark.
Shortly afterwards, Konrad Simonsen is called back to police headquarters in Copenhagen. His superiors want to put him in charge of the Commissioner’s Investigative Department, a new unit set up to handle unsolved murders. Simonsen digs his heels in – he’s enjoying the freedom of his retirement far too much to let himself be dragged back into the bureaucracy of HQ. Meanwhile, however, the missing eleven-year-old soon turns out to be connected to a case from the 1980s, in which a thirteen-year-old girl also vanished without trace. It was Simonsen’s first unsolved case, back when he was working for the homicide squad. The girl was never found.
Simonsen gathers his team and heads back to the small rural town. The two missing girls were related, so the answer to the crime must lie in their family.

An intercity train on its way to Berlin derails near Vordingborg in southern Denmark. Seven people die, two of them police officers. When the investigation begins, the head of the Transport Accident Investigation Commission is visited by a mysterious woman who asks him to drop the case.
Konrad Simonsen is assigned to the task, and it rapidly emerges that the train accident is only the beginning. Before long, Simonsen and his team are ensnared in a case that involves Russian oil interests, an obscure Danish radio station, a group of amateur archaeologists and an internet community that secretly organises undercover operations around the country. At the same time, Konrad Simonsen is dealing with his own internal investigation.
The Miracle Child is the ninth book in the Hammer duo’s successful series about Superintendent Konrad Simonsen.

On a quiet residential road in Liseleje, a projectile fired from hundreds of meters away kills a newborn baby. As Konrad Simonsen and his team get a chance to look into the matter, it turns out that the ammunition is homemade, created to do the most damage possible. But why should a baby, born of two ordinary citizens, die in what most of all looks like a professional execution?
SOLDIER BLUE is the 10th and last volume in Lotte and Søren Hammer's popular series about investigator Konrad Simonsen.

This is the first volume in the series FRIENDS AND ENEMIES, taking place in the years 1939-45. We follow a Danish-Jewish woman from Copenhagen and a Danish-German man from the borders and their journey through the hot spots of World War II.
In this first volume, we follow the young orphan, Peter,from the southern part of Jutland, who is admitted to Hitlerjugend and is given the opportunity to follow a small group of journalists around Germany. Later, Peter enters a junior school, where he is trained as an SS officer.
After graduation, he is posted in the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw. The first two volumes, The Road to Warsaw and the Copper Castle, will be released in March 2020 as a prelude to both the danish reunion and liberation anniversary.

This is the second volume in the series FRIENDS AND ENEMIES, that takes place during the years 1939-45. We follow a Danish-Jewish woman from Copenhagen and a Danish-German man from the Borderland and their journey through the focal points of the war.
In this second volume, we follow the Danish-Jewish Kassandra from Copenhagen, who visits her rich, noble family in Poland as Germany invades the country, and Kassandra has no opportunity to return to Denmark.
She lives for a year under feudal conditions in the Russian-occupied part of Poland until Germany invades the Soviet Union. Then she is sent to the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw. The first two volumes, The Road to Warsaw and the Copper Castle, will be released in March 2020 as a prelude to both the danish reunion and liberation anniversary.