The Nordic crime novel has in its Danish side an intense Jussi Adler-Olsen around its particular Q Department police scene and a promising Soren Sveistrup who has just joined the northernmost noir from scripts for television series.
And this novel has a lot of script, a lively plot that never decays and that seems to compose cinematographic scenarios around a serial killer whose modus operandi aims at that theatricalization of the macabre for a suggestive purpose to be discovered.
We traveled to Copenhagen and let ourselves be guided by Inspector Naia Thulin and a wayward and rebounded Mark Hess, who aspired to much more than an inspector position to which he returns after having savored the honeys of the glory of his profession in a more powerful position. associated with the political than with the police.
As on other occasions in the imaginary of this genre, the first clues of the murderer of a young woman seem to lead to a script written by the dark mind capable of murder. In this case, a fingerprint links the murder with a long-forgotten disappearance of a poor girl.
The impossible then turns on a new light. A girl who has disappeared and left for dead cannot leave her mark. The mother of the little girl, the well-known politician Rosa Hartung takes up old shades of hope.
And that's when the plot takes on that double aspect between drama and thriller. Time begins to run again from despair to a vague hope, with the anxiety of a few hours directed towards vague clues and links drawn on the researchers' slate as erratic paths to the truth.
Between Naia and Mark they will try to establish the most accurate composition of the place, proposing the investigation that best limits the light of new events. But perhaps their analytical minds are not capable of contemplating the most twisted possibility, the one that is capable of building hatred in the slow fire of revenge.
The only certainty that opens up for the two disparate investigators, Naia practically debuting in the resolution of crimes and Mark back from everything, is that evil will find new scenarios to replicate itself. And the longer they take to get it all together, the more likely a new victim will join the case.
You can now buy the novel The Hartung Affair, the literary debut of screenwriter Soren Sveistrup, here: