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And what about that maverick Jo Nesbo? It took seven years before an English translation of his breakthrough novel, “The Redbreast,” was published here. But once this Norwegian author surfaced, he immediately commanded attention with his bold and brutal novels about Harry Hole, a macho homicide cop in perennial pursuit of foaming-at-the-mouth psychopaths. This may sound like heresy, but I find him more Yankee than Scandi, with his aggressive style and off-the-charts serial murders. (By my count, he’s used up Norway’s homicide allotment for the next decade.) But once he broke from the pack, Nesbo was predictably declared “the next Stieg Larsson.” And now that he’s become a bona fide superstar, publishers are pushing their own unknown authors as “the next Jo Nesbo.”

For all the melodramatic American influences in his novels, Nesbo has always been in touch with his nationalist roots. Deep in the heart of “The Redbreast” is a chilling look at Norwegian society during World War II, when the country was under German occupation. Currently, he seems to be fixated on the breakdown of civilization in Sweden, which he sees reflected in the deterioration of Oslo. There are the usual sensationally gruesome deaths in his novel “Phantom,” his best book after “The Snowman,” but three years in Hong Kong have taken the edge off Harry Hole’s sharp perspective on his native land, and he’s stunned to see the wide-open, free-trade marketing in drugs, the swelling ranks of street prostitutes, the asylum seekers from all over the globe changing the face of the old neighborhoods.

As far as I’m concerned, the Nordic invasion can continue until the ice melts. But I sometimes worry about certain impressions I’ve picked up from my reading. I doubt that real-life Norwegian police officers are as undisciplined and self-destructive as Harry Hole, or as crude, rude, vulgar and sex-obsessed as the Oslo detectives Gunnarstranda and Frolich, the slob heroes of K. O. Dahl’s crime novels. My notions of Iceland probably wouldn’t hold up to reality either. Do vast numbers of Icelanders really commit suicide by walking blindly into white-out snowstorms, the way they do in Arnaldur Indridason’s novels? I’m inclined to take the word of Yrsa Sigurdardottir that psychics and clairvoyants make a good living among Iceland’s superstitious citizens. But what about those ghosts, trolls, ogres and elves in her mysteries? I’d hate to think she’s making it all up.

The other thing that bothers me is that I’m missing the subtext of novels imported from countries that might share the same sector of the globe, but are distinctive in ways I just don’t get. Some of the scars from individual national traumas are obvious: Anders Breivick’s murderous spree in Norway; the financial meltdown in Iceland; the fallout in Denmark from the publication of those controversial cartoons; and, of course, the assassination of Sweden’s prime minister Olof Palme in 1986, a crime that is still unsolved. But certain recurring themes in genre fiction, mainly the rise of neo-Nazism and the impact of mass migration, seem to transcend the borders of insular nations and speak to a shared identity crisis.

According to James Thompson, an American writer who lived in Helsinki until his death last summer and wrote bleak crime stories about a cynical cop named Kari Vaara, Finland’s politically pure reputation is “a great myth” intended for foreign consumption. “Like the rest of the Nordic countries,” he observed in his 2012 novel “Helsinki White,” “Finland is going through an ugly extreme right-wing phase with strong anti-foreigner sentiments.”

To my mind, some of the most politically acute Scandinavian crime novels are being written by women who are grappling with these generalized woes in more specific ways. In Sara Blaedel’s novels, her truculent Danish homicide detective, Louise Rick (a housebroken Lisbeth Salander), responds to the influx of immigrants by taking up the cause of marginalized women, including Muslim girls menaced by the tradition of honor killings and Eastern European girls recruited for the sex trade. In THE FORGOTTEN GIRLS, coming out here in February (Grand Central, $26), she expands her net to include girls and young women abused in mental institutions. Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis are even more persuasive on the subject. “The Boy in the Suitcase” and its sequel, “Invisible Murder,” feature a Danish Red Cross nurse named Nina Borg who performs dedicated work on behalf of children from Eastern bloc nations sold into slavery by criminal traffickers.