"The Last Good Man" by A.J. Kazinski Quiz

Answer: Bipolar disorder (Manic depression)

Niels Bentzon has worked in the homicide department for fifteen years, for the last ten of which he has been a negotiator. He is well aware that his colleagues think him odd and believe he is manic-depressive, an older term used for bipolar disorder. Although he acknowledges that he suffers from the mood cycling of depression and euphoric episodes characteristic of the disorder, he denies that he has it, even though he has been on sick leave and medication for the last six months.

It's not confirmed either way in the book, but strongly suggested that he does have the disorder but is in denial to himself about it.

He is very good at his job, and we are introduced to him as he successfully rescues a girl from a hostage situation under her father, a traumatized soldier. Sadly, the soldier has already killed his wife and seriously injured his older daughter.

Answer: Venice

Tommaso di Barbara has lived in Venice his entire life, and, like Niels, has barely ventured away from his hometown. He has gathered information on the murders of a large number of "good people", i.e. humanitarians, aid workers, doctors, scientists who have made significant discoveries for the benefit of humanity.

Although all have a very odd tattoo-like symbol on their backs, he can not find anyone interested in investigating further. Interpol assigns a case number, but likely won't get around to much for the next eighteen months in his estimate.

He discovers a distance of three thousand miles (4800 km) between some of the murder sites; he finds that Copenhagen is within this distance from one of them, and so contacts the police department in case the murderer strikes there next.

Answer: Judaism

Rosenberg is a pastor who is on the list of "good Danish people" that Niels is warning about the murders, as he has taken in various refugees who have been refused asylum. He tells Niels about the concept of the thirty-six righteous men written about in the Jewish Talmud. To get more information, Niels talks to a rabbi named Martin Weizman, who explains that God told Moses that at any one time there are thirty-six righteous people on Earth who protect all of humanity. Known in Hebrew as "Tzadikim Nistarim" ("hidden righteous men") or "Lamed-Vav Tzadikim" ("36 righteous ones"), these people don't know that they are chosen by God, and humanity is doomed without them. Weizman tells him that "according to Kabbalah, even God will die if all thirty-six disappear".

Eighteen is a sacred number in Jewish numerology because the numbers assigned to the letters of the Hebrew word "chai" ("living") add up to 18. Thirty-six is sacred because it is twice this number.

Answer: Astrophysics

Gustav Lund is not strictly a "good man" as such, but his name appears on the computer-generated list because of what he said upon accepting the prestigious Fields Medal: "It will be a mathematician who saves the world". Niels decides to pay him a visit anyway, but finds only his estranged wife, Hannah. She is an astrophysicist who has been out of work since her twelve-year-old, Johannes, committed suicide. He was in a psychiatric hospital suffering with schizophrenia, and Hannah herself went into psychiatric care following his death. Both she and her son have struggled with a high level of intelligence that left them often unsatisfied with life. Hannah was not encouraged by her parents and didn't feel comfortable with her intelligence until she was admitted to the Niels Bohr Institute at seventeen, so she tried to encourage Johannes as much as possible. Unfortunately, it didn't prevent his death.

Hannah cracks the system of the murders by arranging the continents of the world map into the configuration of Pangaea, the super-continent that existed before the continents began to drift apart. When the murders are plotted on this map, they form a series of concentric circles, allowing her to presume the locations of murders that have happened but of which Niels and Tommaso do not know.

Answer: South Africa

Kathrine is a partner in an architectural firm in Denmark. Her job allows her to choose the apartment that she and Niels live in, as her firm was in charge of remodeling an old silo into apartments. She has been in South Africa for six months of a year -ong placement with a firm there, and Niels is supposed to go out to join her, but his travel anxiety prevents him from making the trip.

Using the system that Hannah has derived to locate the fourteenth murder in Cape Town, Niels contacts Kathrine to investigate it in a slum called Khayelitsha. Although reluctant, she uses the GPS coordinates to find a old woman's home, and establishes that an anti-apartheid lawyer had died there under mysterious circumstances, confirming that Hannah's system is accurate for locating the missing murders and the two that have not occurred yet.

Answer: His mother

Tommaso's mother is in a hospice under the care of nuns from the Order of the Sacred Heart. Sister Magdalena provides most of her care. She is a Filipina nun who turned to religion from sex work after a dying pilot saved her life, telling her not to go to a particular shop to get her bike repaired; the building collapsed the next week.

Tommaso's boss brings in a psychiatrist to justify suspending the officer, using his mother's dying as an excuse that he is seeing connections between the murders that aren't there. He continues working on it anyway.

His mother insists that Sister Magdalena puts eighty cents in her hand so she will remember to warn her son not to pay it. However, she dies before Tommaso finds out the details, and he puts the same eighty cents in his pocket, meaning he has exactly the right change to pay into a public toilet, where he dies as the thirty-fifth good man.

Answer: Breaking into a pharmacy

When Niels finds out via a phone call that Tommaso has died in mysterious circumstances, Hannah is not very surprised. Somewhere subconsciously, she must have already surmised the last two deaths would be the two policemen who were the only ones good enough to take an interest in the case. She finds the beginnings of the strange symbol appearing on Niels's back, and they realize that there is not exactly a murderer, but somehow the righteous people, men and women, are dying inexplicably according to the system. Although he is in denial, he flees the city anyway.

On the island of Sjaelland (Zealand), he breaks into a pharmacy to steal drugs, mainly morphine and similar derivatives, in order to sedate himself on a ferry journey so he cannot return to Copenhagen within the week, due to his travel anxiety. However, he is caught by a worker, who he injures in his escape. On the island of Fyn (Funen), he and Hannah are arrested by police after the description of their car is released to the authorities. After contacting Niels's boss, Sommersted, the officers plan to take the two back to Copenhagen anyway.

Answer: Hannah

A few days before Christmas, Niels and Hannah are in a hotel making final plans for a ferry journey that will keep them away from Copenhagen for the predicted time of the murder. Hannah pops into a shop while Niels stays outside to call his girlfriend, Kathrine, but finds he has dialed the number of the pastor, Severin Rosenberg. A car fails to notice the oncoming train, which clips it and sends it hurtling in the direction of the store, where it ploughs into Niels and Hannah, who are taken to the National Hospital in Copenhagen with serious injuries.

After recovering consciousness, Hannah hadn't realized that her heart had stopped twice, once for nine minutes, until a researcher of near-death experiences tells her. In the hospital, there are pictures put on a shelf so high that no one could see it unless they were hovering around the ceiling; not even the researchers know what is in the pictures. However, Hannah accurately describes the picture as a striped baby, proving that her consciousness existed at least temporarily without her body.

Answer: Worning syndrome

Thorkild Worning was a Danish telegraphist after whom the phenomenon including the symbol on the back was named, although he was not the first patient to have it; he was the first to survive it. Niels is astonished to learn this, as he has believed his death to be utterly inevitable. To find out more about Worning, he sneaks into the archives of hospital records, where he reads that Worning was suspected to have paranoid schizophrenia due to his belief that his afflictions were a result of him being one of the selected righteous men.

It transpires that Worning's condition disappeared after he stabbed his wife, and Niels realizes that the only way to avoid his fate is to corrupt his soul with an evil deed, so that he is longer considered one of the righteous.

Answer: True

Niels tries to deny his realization from Worning's experience that he must do something evil, but Hannah has independently come to the same conclusion, and decides that he must sacrifice her, not only to save himself, but so that she can explore the life after death that she has discovered exists. Shortly before Niels is scheduled to die, he and Hannah escape to the hospital roof, and she insists that he shoot her, that he must sacrifice the one he loves. Eventually he does pull the trigger, but the magazine had been removed from the gun earlier; Hannah claims later that she can't remember removing the magazine and that she was truly prepared to die. Because Niels pulled the trigger intending to kill Hannah, it counts as an evil deed, and his condition very quickly returns to normal.