Hess may be disgraced, but he is a dogged investigator and believes something smells to high herring. That’s certainly a perplexing clue, considering that a man confessed to killing her a year earlier. It seems that the girl’s fingerprints are on the toy chestnut figures that turn up at current murder scenes. They are a backbiting lot who may have screwed up the kidnapping and presumed murder of the 12-year-old daughter of Rosa Hartung, the city’s Minister for Social Affairs. However, except for Thulin, Copenhagen’s finest leave a lot to be desired, from the chief on down. Sveistrup’s protagonists are detective Naia Thulin and her reluctant partner, Mark Hess, a detective who apparently disgraced himself while on assignment with Interpol and who is now an unwelcome presence among Copenhagen’s finest.

Except colder, with many descriptions of cops freezing their chestnuts off. One gets the impression that Nordic police work is the same as police work the world over. The Chestnut Man is heavily researched and replete with juicy details of murders, dismemberments, forensic science, and the like. The HarperCollins publicists claim that Sveistrup may be the next Stieg Larsson (Swedish author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy) or Jo Nesbø (Norwegian author of the great Harry Hole mysteries). The author of The Chestnut Man is Søren Sveistrup, a Danish scriptwriter and film producer, perhaps best known on this side of the Atlantic for the AMC television series “The Killing,” which was adapted from a Danish TV series (and sold to more than a hundred countries).

And, voila, I was right! I may take that strategy to the racetrack.) (I did identify someone I thought so unlikely that I made the character my chief suspect. The book is so chockfull of them that it seemed half of Copenhagen (population 777, 218) might be guilty of the brutal crimes detailed therein. (Not the actual fish, of course, but the revenue it generates.) Which brings us to The Chestnut Man, a mystery which has schools of herring, of the red variety. Indeed, Copenhagen was a city built on herring.

The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup