FINAL BOY

The Chestnut Man is a thriller in the Scandinavian Noir genre – the writer is the person who wrote “The Killing”. It is set in Denmark, where some murders take place, and at the scenes a little man made out of chestnuts is left. Imagine a sort of mini snowman, with one smaller chestnut put on top of another, and then the head has little eyes and matchsticks inserted for arms and legs. (See picture below from the cover.

I imagine it is a tradition in Denmark which has a bit more resonance. Imagine an Elf-on-The-Shelf sort of thing. (In fact, if someone hasn’t already pitched a macabre elf on the shelf I’d be very surprised)

At the heart of this story is a politician who is coming back to work after a year’s absence, because her daughter has been kidnapped and never found. Her fingerprints being found on the chestnut men left at the scene raises all sorts of questions.

This is fast-paced, intriguing story and mystery; and there’s some horror overtones to the murders – we don’t linger on them for long but they are pretty grisly. There are good twists and changes of direction. The two detectives are perhaps a bit underwritten – we don’t really get to know them that much – there are certainly suggestions that both of them have got a lot more going on under the surface than we really get to see and perhaps there was an intention to revisit them. They’re both perfectly solid and they don’t get in the way of the story at all, but I felt that they could have been more and sadly the more interesting one of the two is the one we spend slightly less time with.

If you like the sort of Seven/ The Bridge style of thriller where the killer has a plan and purpose and the detectives are trying to find out what that is at the same time as we’re trying to work out who it is, then this is a really good thriller in that mould. It really flies by and there are no lulls or scenes I’d cut. The incidental characters are all done really well – the author paints such a good picture of them and brings them to life so quickly. (Going back to my earlier bit of criticism, it shows how good the author could be at developing the main characters if they’d allowed themselves to do that.)

There’s also an adaptation on Netflix – I haven’t seen that yet so can’t comment