Soren Sveistrup - The Chestnut Man

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Standard, clichéd serial killer stuff

I ended up pretty thoroughly annoyed with The Chestnut Man. To be fair, it’s not a genre I would normally read and I wouldn’t have touched it if it hadn’t been by the man who created the excellent TV series The Killing. This means that fans of the serial-killer genre may like it far more than I did, but for me it was just a series of tired old clichés strung together, albeit strung together quite well for much of the book.

In Denmark, a series of sadistic killings (of women, naturally) is marked by the killer’s trademark Chestnut Man left at each scene. A maverick cop, sent back to the Copenhagen police after his insubordinate behaviour annoyed his Europol bosses, suspects that these killings may throw doubt on the solution to the murder of the daughter of a prominent politician a year before. There is a Race Against Time to catch the killer before...I’m sure you get the picture.

I read this while I was ill and needed brain-off entertainment. The first 400 pages didn’t do too badly on that, but I just ticked off the clichés as they went past: the maverick cop and his ill-matched partner who begin to form an attachment; the boorish, sexist police colleague; the vain, unheeding boss; the killer who is always One Step Ahead and Plays Games With The Police, child abuse as a cynical plot device, the female investigator under threat...and so on and so on. I could just about live with all that, but the final 100 pages became so silly that I lost patience, and I especially disliked the corny old Cornered Killer Climax In Which The Killer Explains Everything To The Victim scene (yeah, right), which in this case is largely repellent, misogynistic torture porn. The explanation scarcely holds together and the psychology is pretty silly, so coupled with the ludicrous implausibility of subsequent events it made me very irritated indeed.

I had expected something deeper and more thoughtful from Sveistrup, but The Chestnut Man is just another bog-standard Scandi serial-killer thriller. There’s no superbly original central character like Lisbeth Salander to lift it above the ordinary, and nor, of course, does it benefit from a brilliant screen performance from the likes of Sofie Grabol or Sofia Helin which made The Killing and The Bridge such classics. Fans of the genre may enjoy this, but I’m afraid I didn’t.

(My thanks to Penguin Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)