The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup

Harper, 528 pages, $28.99 (c2019)

Translated from the Danish by Caroline Wright

Let’s see. Creepy nursery rhyme. Check. Man with eyes of different colors. Check. Copenhagen. Check. Bloody, grisly, grim, haunting murders. Um. Check, check, check. All the elements are there. Buckle up, buttercup!

Would "The Chestnut Man" be more appealing if you learned that the author, Søren Sveistrup, is the creator of the original version of “The Killing,” the Danish production that spawned the celebrated American version. According to Sofie Gråbøl, the star of the Danish series, there's an American version because Americans “for some reason cannot read subtitles, or they don’t want to.” I didn’t hear her say it, but I’m sure it was accompanied by a slyly humorous smile. Both series are worthy of bingeing, bingement, bingeitude, binge-watching. The television series is dark and grisly, and so is this book. Sveistrup has already shown us he can do heart-thumping and serious twisty-turny plot.

Naia Thulin is a smart detective. She is so smart she is angling for a way to move up from the Major Crimes Unit to NC3, the cyber crimes unit, after only nine months as a detective. She is especially eager to get out of the MCU when she is saddled with babysitting a bad boy, Mark Hess, who was kicked out of Europol as the Danish liaison and sent home to the Copenhagen squad to await review. Hess is the man with eyes of different colors. The rest of him, including his attitude, is equally as wonky. He is mostly uncommunicative, terse when he deigns to say something, and seems as though he is peering over the border into a parallel world, a better parallel world, because he sure as hell has no interest in the current one. 

It takes something big to get Hess’ interest. The murder of Laura Kjær fits the bill. She is a young mother who is tortured and left to die in an outdoor children’s playhouse near her home. A dangling “chestnut man” children’s toy is left at the scene. The prologue contains a grisly murder done several years in the past. In that, there are many chestnut creations populating a grim basement. What does the old incident have to do with the awful torture and murder of the young mother? Thulin and Hess are observant, intuitive, and smart, so they begin to tease out the clues and eliminate the dead-ends.

There are 500 pages in the English translation I read. Included is a lot of step-by-step scene setting. (“Their voices seep out under the door of the glass-partitioned room, and a few teenagers in slippers have stopped to watch.”) There are multiple victims, almost victims, and a victim-in-progress. There are red herrings, bad police practice, ambitious supervisors, and a taunting killer to waylay poor Thulin and Hess. Even after the killer is revealed, there is a lot of action and detection to do, probably constituting a novella all by itself. The novel’s heftiness is satisfying, even if there are some plot lines that are unnecessary but intriguing. I definitely got the feeling that Sveistrup was setting the groundwork for another television series. (“And in episodes nine and ten, the detectives chase down the real killer.”)

Spoiler alert: Hess is not an air-head. Another spoiler alert: As it is in so many Scandinavian mysteries, there is a social commentary element to “The Chestnut Man.” Third spoiler alert: Will we see a sequel? I hope so.