The Girl Without Skin is the fourth novel by Danish author, Mads Peder Nordbo, the first book in the Greenland series and the first to be translated into English. Danish journalist Matt Cave has a great story he can’t publish: the mummified corpse of a Norseman found on Greenland’s ice cap could give him a world-wide scoop, but his photographer’s shots have all been stolen, and the corpse has gone missing.

On top of that, the policeman guarding it has been brutally murdered, and authorities have directed his boss at Nuuk’s leading paper, Sermitsiaq, to suppress the story. So Matt’s editor sends him to the archive to research a spate of murders from the early seventies. There are similarities and some differences, but before Matt learns much, the body of a possible witness, again butchered, turns up.

Matt’s a bit mystified by the journal he’s acquired, written by Jakob Pedersen, a cop who disappeared without trace at the same time, but a tattooed and tough young Greenlandic woman, Tupaarnaq seems to know something. However, as the old archivist says: “…if we’re going to rake over this old case, we need to go about it quietly. A brutal murder like this one has only remained unsolved because someone important wanted it that way.”

In November 1973, Danish cop Jakob Pederson has lived in Nuuk for some years and is determined to rid the city of its child sexual abuse problem. His covert research has shown him many homes where he suspects young girls are being abused, but in four of them, he is virtually certain of it. But, within a few short days, these four men are viciously murdered: their skin flayed and their organs removed in the manner of a hunted seal.

This is a marvellous dose of Scandi crime: dark and blood-thirsty with twists and red herrings keeping the pages turning and the reader guessing right up to the heart-stopping climax. Nordbo wraps his tale in some beautiful prose: “Everything was swallowed up by this grey North Atlantic blanket, whose moist breath licked the houses and the mountains and caused everything to run together in a foggy, cold cloud” and he draws attention to some shocking statistics on sexual assault of children.

This first in the series is flawlessly translated from the original Danish by Charlotte Barslund, and English-speaking readers will be hoping the translation of the second Greenland book is published soon.