In the same way that Sveistrup would have to set up all of these locations on the page - a weather-worn farmhouse, a wood-panel home interior, an apartment building with a facade like a mosaic, public buildings with surprisingly reflective hallways - there’s an added beat to each successive establishing shot that carries a kind of novelistic patience amid the greater race-against-time elements of the mystery.

“The Chestnut Man” is perhaps on that same spectrum, but to its credit, there’s decidedly more visual panache here. Netflix is certainly no stranger to the crime-novel-to-TV pipeline, having carved out an entire programming wing devoted to Harlan Coben stories. (If that rudimentary, stick-figure evocation of lost innocence has you thinking “I gave you all the clues,” it only makes sense that Sveistrup is a credited screenwriter on “The Snowman.”) One of the only clues? A tiny chestnut figurine left behind in place of a missing appendage. From there, “The Chestnut Man” jumps forward, following a pair of detectives, Naia Thulin (Danica Curcic) and Mark Hess (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) as they get drawn into a present-day homicide investigation. The show’s 1987-set opening sequence might as well be labeled “Prologue,” a walk through a vicious and bloody crime scene punctuated by one more act of violence to add to a pile that will only keep growing. “The Chestnut Man” Tine Hardenīut rather than reflect the pedigree of someone whose previous TV work capitalized so well on an episodic form of storytelling, “The Chestnut Man” feels like an attempt to not so much adapt his own book as transpose it. “The Chestnut Man” has similar roots, co-created by Søren Sveistrup, whose 2018 novel of the same name came after he created the original Danish version of “The Killing” over a decade prior. It’s the kind of on-the-nose, not-even-symbolic connection that you’d expect to find in a cheesy page-turner - the kind of propulsive, twisty crime novel straight from an airport bookstore’s bestseller shelf. ‘The Diplomat’ Renewed for Season 2 at Netflix

The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup