The Chestnut Man
Copenhagen detective Naia Thulin is one day from a transfer to the elite cybercrime unit when she catches a fresh murder, a woman beaten to death in a playground with one hand cut off and a small chestnut figure left next to the body. Europol detective Mark Hess, exiled from The Hague and trying to get back, gets paired with her and finds a fingerprint on the chestnut figure that belongs to a missing 12-year-old girl, the daughter of social-affairs minister Rosa Hartung. The official story is that the child was murdered a year earlier and her killer is in prison. The chestnut man pattern rewrites the entire case across 500 pages of cold-investigation procedural, drawing in the foster-care system, a string of identical chestnut killings, and the kind of political cover-up Sveistrup built his career exposing in The Killing.
What you might want to know about The Chestnut Man
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Two Copenhagen detectives chase a serial killer who leaves chestnut figures at every scene in the bestselling Danish Nordic noir from the creator of The Killing.
Yes. Netflix released a six-episode Danish-language adaptation of The Chestnut Man in 2021. The show follows the novel closely and is widely considered one of the strongest Nordic crime adaptations.
Yes. Soren Sveistrup created the original Danish series The Killing (Forbrydelsen) before writing The Chestnut Man. The Chestnut Man was his debut novel after his television career.
The Chestnut Man was written by Soren Sveistrup, published in 2019 by Penguin Books, Limited.
The Chestnut Man is 528 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Chestnut Man takes most readers 8 to 11 hours to finish.
The Chestnut Man is a standalone novel by Soren Sveistrup, not part of a series.
The Chestnut Man is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.