The Chestnut Man

The Creator of The Killing Turns to Fiction

Søren Sveistrup is the screenwriter who created The Killing (Forbrydelsen), the Danish crime series that, when it aired on BBC Four, effectively launched the English-speaking world’s appetite for Nordic noir. The Killing’s Sarah Lund — relentlessly focused, emotionally guarded, wearing that jumper — became a cultural touchstone. The Chestnut Man, Sveistrup’s debut novel, introduces a new detective in a similar register: Naia Thulin, a Copenhagen investigator who is methodical, impatient with bureaucracy, and carrying a life that is more complicated than she allows her colleagues to see.

The novel opens with a discovery that announces its intentions immediately: a woman is found murdered in a Copenhagen playground, and beside her body is a small figure made of sticks and chestnuts — the kind of thing children make in autumn. It is innocent and terrible. When the next murder victim is found with an identical figure, and when forensic analysis reveals a fingerprint on one of the chestnuts that belongs to a girl who has been missing for a year, Thulin and her reluctant partner Mark Hess find themselves in a case that connects serial murder to the highest levels of Danish politics.

The Architecture of Dread

Sveistrup’s background in television screenwriting gives The Chestnut Man a quality of narrative efficiency that thriller readers will appreciate: scenes are constructed for maximum effect, information is revealed with careful timing, and the book moves at a pace that its page count does not betray. But the novel is not merely functional. The chestnut figures — described each time with the same quiet specificity — accumulate a dread that purely mechanical thrillers rarely achieve. There is something about their handmade quality, their suggestion of time spent and care taken, that makes them far more disturbing than elaborately constructed murder scenes would be.

The missing girl at the heart of the mystery is Rosa Hartung, daughter of Denmark’s Minister for Social Affairs. Her disappearance a year earlier was investigated, her presumed death accepted. The fingerprint on the chestnut figure suggests otherwise — and the political dimensions of the case immediately complicate the investigation. Sveistrup, who has spent a career writing about how Danish institutions function and fail, uses the political strand to ask questions that straightforward serial-killer fiction usually avoids: what does the welfare state owe to its most vulnerable members, and what happens when it fails them?

Nordic Noir at Its Most Assured

The novel’s final act, in which the scattered threads of the investigation converge on a truth that is both more and less expected than the reader anticipates, is handled with the confidence of a writer who knows exactly what he is doing. The resolution does not cheat: everything that matters has been present in the text, and the emotional reckoning that follows the solution is given full weight.

Thulin emerges as one of Nordic noir’s more interesting recent detectives — not because she is unconventional by genre standards, but because Sveistrup writes her internal life with a precision that makes her feel like a person rather than a type. A Netflix adaptation followed the novel’s success, demonstrating how thoroughly cinematic the book’s construction already was. For readers who come to it from the series, or who arrive fresh, it stands as a genuinely accomplished work in a crowded genre.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A tautly constructed Nordic noir debut from the creator of The Killing, elevated by a memorably unsettling central image and a detective worth following.