AN UNSUCCESSFUL MAN

Nielsen's first over here (although after spending 28 years as a policeman he's been writing steadily for ten years) is a monochromatic procedural--one of those new bloodless red herrings of the genre. Det. Ancher wonders how a lodger could be found hanging from an extension cord unless he did it himself but two worse murders, of little girls, are on the same circuit. These gloomy Danes and their gritty actuality are apparently appropriating the form and they do it tonelessly if fairly well.