The Beast Within

By Bo Tao Michaëlis
Chief Detective Konrad Simonsen has borrowed a beautiful summer house in Jutland from his aristocratic subordinate, within the Copenhagen Metropolitan Police Department, the Lady Nathalie von Rosen. Here, far from the hubbub of the modern world, he wants to re-connect with his teenage daughter, whom for one reason or another he has not seen, visited or known for fifteen years. Everything is going splendidly for father and daughter, when he receives a phone call that, out in a sleepy suburb of Copenhagen, the green and well-groomed town of Bagsværd, some children have found the bodies of five naked, badly disfigured men, hanging with a perverse mathematical precision from the ceiling of a gymnasium. The school’s janitor, a gifted drunkard, Per Clausen, soon becomes the prime suspect. The newspapers whip up a mood of hysteria, and Simonsen tries by every means possible to keep a lid on the sensational angles on the case to prevent the media from creating a lynch mob mentality in the court of popular sentiment. But the police have no doubt that the tormented janitor knows more about these bestial killings than he lets on – such as what the motive behind this mysterious massacre must have been. There are indications of paedophilia and other outrages against children. The Danish police in general and Simonsen in particular must stand firm to keep the mass hysteria from the man in the street to the Danish Parliament from making a mess of the case. Svinehunde (The Beast Within) becomes a description of the beast within ordinary Danes, cutting across cultural and class differences.

Lotte & Søren Hammer, a brother-and-sister writing team, have written a human detective novel in what has become known throughout the world as the Scandinavian style in which the focus shifts from the professional effectiveness of the police to an intimate look into their private lives, besieged on all sides by the travails of the modern, middle-class nuclear family with children, divorce, and lifestyle. Moreover, it has been written with an easily accessible realism that reflects its times in an effective and entertaining language – with a plot that, for once, is not set in some demonic rural province but in the bustling, multicultural metropolis of Copenhagen. The Beast Within is the first volume of a planned series on Konrad Simonsen and co.

Translated by Russell Dees

Dansk version