THE CHESTNUT MAN

HHHHH by Søren Sveistrup Michael Joseph, £12.99

DENMARK, to steal a plug for the country’s most famous brewery, probably has the best fictional serial killers in the world.

Nordic noir has been captivating readers and TV viewers for a generation with absorbing tales of gritty Scandinavian detectives on the trail of icy-eyed psychopaths whose MOs have become ever more sadistic, their motives increasingly bizarre. Norwegians, Swedes, even the Finns are in on the act.

Danish scriptwriter Søren Sveistrup is creator of The Killing, the television series that won global acclaim with its separate European and American outings. Here he has delved into the literary form of the Scandinavian crime genre with his debut novel and The Chestnut Man has success written all over it.

The narrative is a highly plausible police procedural account of the hunt for a murderer committing crimes of escalating savagery but it also comes with a smorgasbord of subplots and false trails to confound both the reader and the desperate homicide team.

Pairing brilliant young detective Naia Thulin, whose has her eye on a prime cyber-crime posting, with Europol has-been Mark Hess might seem clichéd, but their awkward chemistry adds authenticity to the manhunt. And a shaky pact also allows each character to go off-piste in personal pursuit of a maniac whose trademark is amputating victims’ hands and feet and leaving behind dolls made from chestnuts.

Haunting the investigation is the “long-solved” kidnap case of a government minister’s daughter. The suspect is behind bars, the child is still missing, presumed dead, and the case files are stamped “closed”. So when the vanished youngster’s fingerprints are found by crime scene investigators on the sinister chestnut dolls, the case enters its darkest dimensions.

Is the girl alive? Is the jailed suspect innocent? Who is the Chestnut Man and why does his apparition always herald death?

You will never want to play conkers again.

SW