Step into the shadowy landscapes of the north, where long winters breed darker tales. Dive deep into the world of Nordic Noir — the crime fiction genre that pairs bleak, atmospheric settings with complex characters and haunting mysteries. Curated by Jessica Schiefelbein.
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The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup
A psychopath is terrorizing Copenhagen.
His calling card is a “chestnut man”–a handmade doll made of matchsticks and two chestnuts–which he leaves at each bloody crime scene.
Examining the dolls, forensics makes a shocking discovery–a fingerprint belonging to a young girl, a government minister’s daughter who had been kidnapped and murdered a year ago.
A tragic coincidence–or something more twisted?
To save innocent lives, a pair of detectives must put aside their differences to piece together the Chestnut Man’s gruesome clues.
Because it’s clear that the madman is on a mission that is far from over.
And no one is safe.
Where: A quiet fishing village in northern Iceland, where no one locks their doors. It is accessible only via a small mountain tunnel.
Who: Ari Thor is a rookie policeman on his first posting, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavik. He has a past that he’s unable to leave behind.
What: A young woman is found lying half-naked in the snow, bleeding and unconscious, and a highly esteemed elderly writer falls to his death. Ari is dragged straight into the heart of a community where he can trust no one and secrets and lies are a way of life.
Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell
It was a senselessly violent crime: on a cold night in a remote Swedish farmhouse an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death, and his wife is left to die with a noose around her neck. And as if this didn’t present enough problems for the Ystad police Inspector Kurt Wallander, the dying woman’s last word is foreign, leaving the police the one tangible clue they have-and in the process, the match that could inflame Sweden’s already smoldering anti-immigrant sentiments.
Unlike the situation with his ex-wife, his estranged daughter, or the beautiful but married young prosecutor who has peaked his interest, in this case, Wallander finds a problem he can handle. He quickly becomes obsessed with solving the crime before the already tense situation explodes, but soon comes to realize that it will require all his reserves of energy and dedication to solve.
Late one night, outside Stockholm, Mikael Kohler-Frost is found wandering. Thirteen years earlier, he went missing along with his younger sister. They were long thought to have been victims of Sweden’s most notorious serial killer, Jurek Walter, now serving a life sentence in a maximum security psychiatric hospital. Now Mikael tells the police that his sister is still alive and being held by someone he knows only as the Sandman. Years ago, Detective Inspector Joona Linna made an excruciating personal sacrifice to ensure Jurek’s capture. He is keenly aware of what this killer is capable of, and now he is certain that Jurek has an accomplice. He knows that any chance of rescuing Mikael’s sister depends on getting Jurek to talk, and that the only agent capable of this is Inspector Saga Bauer, a twenty-seven-year-old prodigy. She will have to go under deep cover in the psychiatric ward where Jurek is imprisoned, and she will have to find a way to get to the psychopath before it’s too late–and before he gets inside her head.
The night the first snow falls a young boy wakes to find his mother gone. He walks through the silent house but finds only wet footprints on the stairs. In the garden looms a solitary figure: a snowman bathed in cold moonlight, its black eyes glaring up at the bedroom windows. Round its neck is his mother’s pink scarf.
Inspector Harry Hole is convinced there is a link between the disappearance and a menacing letter he received some months earlier. As Harry and his team delve into unsolved case files, they discover that an alarming number of wives and mothers have gone missing over the years. When a second woman disappears Harry’s suspicions are confirmed: he is a pawn in a deadly game. For the first time in his career Harry finds himself confronted with a serial killer operating on his turf, a killer who will drive him to the brink of insanity.
A brilliant thriller with a pace that never lets up, The Snowman confirms Jo Nesbø’s position as an international star of crime fiction.
Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg
A Time Best Book of the Year · An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year · A People Best Book of the Year · Winner of the CWA Silver Dagger Award · A Finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel
First published in 1992, Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow instantly became an international sensation. When caustic Smilla Jaspersen discovers that her neighbor–a neglected six-year-old boy, and possibly her only friend–has died in a tragic accident, a peculiar intuition tells her it was murder. Unpredictable to the last page, Smilla’s Sense of Snow is one of the most beautifully written and original crime stories of our time, a new classic
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.
It’s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.
It’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age–and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it–who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism–and an unexpected connection between themselves.
It’s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives.
Everything is peaceful in Tommerup, Denmark, until a young mother disappears in the middle of an idyllic summer day. There’s no trace of the missing woman when Chief Superintendent Liam Stark and Superintendent Dea Torp are called to investigate. The small town is on edge, rumors begin to fly, and blame is cast on Charlotte’s husband, who was the last to see her. When another person goes missing and Liam and Dea find a strange note linking the second missing person to the first crime, they suspect the disappearances may be the work of a serial killer. As the investigation continues, dark secrets about the victims from the past are revealed. Is someone targeting them because of this? As more people vanish, it’s a race against time for Liam and Dea, who find themselves face-to-face with horrifying footage that reveals what is happening to the victims – and what will happen to future targets if they can’t stop the killer. In this pulse-pounding thriller, Sara Blaedel and Mads Peder Nordbo ratchet up the tension in a cat-and-mouse game where the killer is always one step ahead.
This third novel in the “thrilling, nerve-wracking” (Shelf Awareness) Korner and Werner series follows the two detectives as they searchfor a missing teenager and uncover the web of lies that has threatened his life–and may prevent him from ever being found.
When fifteen-year-old Oscar Dreyer-Hoff disappears in this “masterpiece of Nordic noir” (Booklist, starred review), the police assume he’s simply a runaway–a typically overlooked middle child doing what teenagers do all around the world. But his frantic family is certain that something terrible has happened. After all, what runaway would leave behind a note that reads:
He looked around and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter’s work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.
It’s not much to go on, but it’s all that detectives Jeppe Kørner and Anette Werner have. And with every passing hour, as the odds of finding a missing person grow dimmer, it will have to be enough.
Shelf Analysis 