Tag Archives: Danish author

The Chestnut Man by Soren Sveistrup

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The Chestnut Man by Soren Sveistrup was first published in 2019 and it was translated from Danish by Caroline Waight. I think it’s the first Scandi Noir book that I’ve read and I borrowed it from the library so that I could take part in a Scandi meme which involved reading five books, I already have books at home by Finnish and Icelandic authors and I thought this would spur me on to read more over 2023, then I realised that the project was just for January! Oh well, I’ll be doing my own wee Scandi reading project over this year anyway.

The setting is Copenhagen where the body of a young woman has been found, minus one hand. It seems that the killer has left his calling card in the shape of a little ‘man’ made from chestnuts and matchsticks. More of them turn up at crime scenes and it’s obvious that there’s a serial killer around. It seems that the killer might be somehow linked to the disappearance of the young daughter of a politician the previous year, her body had never been found, but the police think they have solved the case, did they get the wrong man?

Naia Thulin has been assigned to the case and she has been given a new partner. Mark Hess has just been thrown out of Europol for some mysterious reason, and nobody is impressed with him, as far as they’re concerned he’s damaged goods.

I’m not sure if ‘enjoy’ is the correct word to use in relation to this reading experience. I like the plot and some of the characters, but it was just a wee bit too gruesome for me, – but then that was no real surprise, having watched The Killing on TV, and that was written by this author.

Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen

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Mercy cover

When I read the blurb on the back of Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen I had real qualms about actually getting down to reading the book as it seemed like a nightmare to me – what do you think?

At first the prisoner scratches at the walls until her fingers bleed. But there is no escaping the room. With no way of measuring time, her days, weeks, months go unrecorded. She vows not to go mad. She will not give her captors the satisfaction. She will die first.

But I had requested it from the library, meaning to use it as part of the 2019 European Reading Challenge, and more importantly my blogpal had really enjoyed it – so I gritted my teeth and got stuck into it.

The action swings between 2002 when Merete Lynggaard a high profile politician disappears from a ferry, and 2007 when detective Carl Morck goes back to work after being involved in a traumatic case which involved the death of one of his colleagues and paralysis of another. Carl isn’t popular with his other colleagues and so he’s made head of a new department which is housed in the basement of police headquarters. Ostensibly Department Q has been set up to re-investigate cold cases, but it’s really just to keep Carl out of the way. He’s allocated another member of staff to help him, Assad is an Iraqi refugee who turns out to be a lot more useful than at first suspected.

The premise of this book was for me devilishly fiendish, but then I hate the thought of basements and the possibility of being stuck in one, but amazingly I really enjoyed the book and particularly the character of Assad, this is the first book in a series and I’ll be reading more of them, for one thing I want to know more about Assad’s background.

You can read what TracyK of Bitter Tea and Mystery thought of the book here. Mercy is published in the US under the title The Keeper of Lost Causes.