Nina Borg, the central character in this startling novel from Denmark, has convinced herself she’s the only person who can save the world and put things right. She seems to be going at the monumental task one small job at a time. In The Boy in the Suitcase, she takes on international trafficking in young children, though at the start of the story she hasn’t the faintest idea of the nature of the terrible crime she’s dealing with.

At first glance, Borg appears to be a modern feminist who has it all: a husband and three children, a roomy flat in Copenhagen, a fulfilling job as an International Red Cross nurse. But Borg, the idealist, is forever rushing off to the world’s hellholes to rescue the ill, the starving and the beleaguered. In the new book, the ghastly problem comes to her at home in Copenhagen.

When Borg does a favour for a friend, picking up a suitcase at the city’s main train station, she finds a three-year-old boy inside the suitcase, drugged, naked but very much alive. The plot that unfolds from this astounding discovery includes murder, big money and acts of remarkable cruelty to children and their mothers.

The two authors, Lene Kaaberbol and Agnette Friis, tell the story from the viewpoints of a half-dozen people. These characters cover the moral range from the suffering mother of the boy in the suitcase to the man who put him there and the other guy who financed the casually inhuman activity. But the narrative never loses sight of Borg, the woman who manages to persist in protecting the kid in the suitcase even when she realizes she’s risking the loss of everything decent in her life.

Kaaberbol and Friis have had individual past successes in genres of much different sorts, best-selling fantasy novels for Kaaberbol, children’s books for Friis. Working together, they’ve come up with a novel of feminist crime fiction that has tremendous power. It’s a benefit to English-speaking readers that Kaaberbol provided the English translation, producing a highly appealing version of the original Danish book. Unlike other translations of Scandinavian crime novels, usually written by translators from England, this one is smooth, elegant and free of the usual tone-deaf English slang.

Novels about stolen children are emotionally hard for most readers to handle, and yet they are instantly compelling because so much is at stake: a child’s tender psyche or even life...But when a 3-year-old is forcibly taken from his anguished mother, as happens in this terrific Danish thriller, you know you’re in for a frantic read. Is this “fun”? Yes and no. What’s for sure is that, once you start reading, you can’t stop — it’s as if the poor kid’s life depends on your getting to the end as fast as possible......This series debut — translated with assurance by Kaaberbol — looks like another winning entry in the emotionally lacerating Scandinavian mystery sweepstakes.