Blood on Snow - Jo Nesbo

Given that Midnight Sun is billed as Blood On Snow 2, it comes as no suprise that Blood On Snow itself is the precursor of Midnight Sun - the reason Olav runs away to the deep north. The set up is ingenious, worthy of James M Cain. Olav, whose only talent is as a fixer, is ordered by his gangster boss to kill the boss's much younger wife. Olav, of course, falls for the wife, which means doing a deal with his boss's rival, the Fisherman (who ultimately pursues him to the deep north in Part 2). The twists are obvious in hindsight, but Nesbo's great gift is the ability to slide them past you, unnoticed, as you read. Olav is a much more interesting character here than in Midnight Sun - a psychopath whose heart is in the right place. It sounds bizarre but it works.

Again, a very slim volume in which irrelevant detail is pared to the bone.  I liked it better than Midnight Sun. It is not a patch on Headhunters and inferior to perhaps half the Harry Hole Oslo series.

Midnight Sun - Jo Nesbo

This is, I believe, Nesbo's latest novel. It came out last year. Headhunters was the first Nesbo stand-alone novel. This is the fourth. I raved about Headhunters here on my Biblioblog but got a little bored with the more recent Harry Hole novels. The reprints of the early Hole novels, long delayed in the UK, were delayed for a good reason - they were rubbish. I was beginning to lose faith. Then came the TV series Occupied, with a storyline by Nesbo, and I was tempted to try again. So, having missed The Son and Blood on Snow, I picked up Midnight Sun.

OK, it is not as good as Headhunters. The characters are more traditional, the twist is not as jaw-dropping, the cringe scene is nowhere near as hideous, but at least at barely 200 pages it doesn't outlive its story. The story is, as I say, fairly basic: hero runs away from big city to wilderness with a dark secret - he has done a very bad thing, which turns out not to be so bad after all and is kind of justified. He pitches up in the wilds with an assumed name and falls for the preacher's daughter.

The big difference, of course, is that this is Norway. The wilderness is extremely wild. The locals are not rednecks but Sami (Laplanders) and this is Nesbo telling the tale. He does so expertly. It's secondary Nesbo (which is not the same as second-rate Nesbo) but it's a cracking read and therefore a welcome return to form.
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A blast from the past. My review of Headhunters from March 2012:

How annoying for those of us who write - the best contemporary Nordic author of series crime fiction, quite possibly the best full-stop, turns out to be just as good at stand-alone first-person psychological thrillers.  No wonder this has been snapped up for the first Nesbo movie, which opens in the UK and Ireland on April 6.

Thank goodness it's a Norwegian movie, not some hopeless Hollywood mess.  Unfortunately, I suspect that means it won't get shown much outside major cities.

However, back to the book...

I have simply never read such a masterful riff on the twists and turns essential for the genre, nor the untrustworthy narrator device which, when done right, raises the typical to the exceptional.  For example, most thriller writers return to their prologue at the end.  Not Nesbo; he picks it up in the middle and makes it his key turning-point.  As for the final twist ... it was so unexpected, so stunning, that I had to flip back to the relevant passage to make sure Nesbo hadn't cheated.  And he hadn't.  Wonderful - more than worthy of Hitchcock or Patrick Hamilton.

But the world of books would be a dreary old place if we all agreed...

I found a slightly different opinion on Beattie's Book Blog (unofficial homepage of the New Zealand book community), which is an excellent, highly-informed site:

I have to say I didn't rate the stand-alone Headhunters, (although I reckon it will make a great movie); no give me the Harry Hole titles any day and on that note the good news is that the next one is due soon.Phantom – the thrilling follow-up to The Leopard……….Synopsis:Summer. A boy is lying on the floor of an Oslo apartment. He is bleeding and will soon die. In order to place his life and death in some kind of context he begins to tell his story. Outside, the church bells toll.Autumn. Former police inspector Harry Hole returns to Oslo after three years abroad. He seeks out his old boss at Police Headquarters to request permission to investigate a homicide. But the case is already closed: the young junkie was in all likelihood shot dead by a fellow addict. Yet, Harry is granted permission to visit the boy's alleged killer in jail. There, he meets himself and his own history. What follows is the solitary investigation of what appears to be the first impossible case in Harry Hole's career. And while Harry is searching, the murdered boy continues his story.A man walks the dark streets of Oslo. The streets are his and he has always been there. He is a phantom.Yay, bring it on, can't wait to read it................

Me neither.  Actually, I don't have to.  It is published in the UK today and Harvill Secker have done a vid.

What I want to know, though, is what has happened to the first two Hole books, The Bats (1997) and The Cockroaches (1998), neither of which are available here?  I can't think of another series, which has established a reputation and sales in another country, that hasn't started from the beginning here.  Decidedly odd.

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Really, really wish I hadn't asked that last question. Do you suppose it provoked them?
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Here are all the Nesbo books I've reviewed on this site.

In the Darkness - Karin Fossum

Karin Fossum is one of the leading lights of Nordic Noir. She has won all the prizes and is up there with Mankell and Nesbo in Scandinavia.  It is such a shame that she is so poorly published in English.  You never find her books in major bookshops and the product itself looks cheap and frankly manky.

In the Darkness dates from 1995 and is ostensibly an Inspector Sejer novel (her other protagonist Skarre hardly features).  In fact Sejer appears to do very little - until everything falls into place at the end and you realise just how clever a book this is.  The final twist came out of nowhere but, for me, was just perfect.  In many ways I was reminded of Nesbo's standalone novel Headhunters, which I've raved about before on this blog (I still haven't plucked up the courage to watch the movie for fear of disappointment).  It's no secret that Nesbo is a Fossum fan - the endorsement on the moon above is, for once, genuine.  Indeed he pays homage in Headhunters to one of the more startling moments here.  I won't go into detail, because the last thing I want to do is give any plot away, but toilets are involved.  Nesbo's cyclical structure, so different from the linear arrangement of the Hole novels, is surely also influenced by In the Darkness.

A magnificent achievement.  My interest in Nordic Noir, which was slipping a bit after a couple of imported duds on TV, is reinvigorated.

Cockroaches - Jo Nesbo

The second Harry Hole thriller, originally published in 1998 but only translated into English last year.  At last the UK publishing strategy becomes clear.  They published Nesbo to cash in on Nordic Noir, following the huge success of Henning Mankell, but there was a problem with the Hole series - the first two, Cockroaches and the sub-standard Bat, are set in the very un-Scandinavian Thailand and Australia respectively.  So they started with the Oslo-set Redbreast and stuck to the sequence until Nesbo was established as the most popular of all the Nordic crime writers.

Cockroaches is much better than the disappointing Bat.  Nesbo really gets into his stride with the second outing for Harry.  A Norwegian diplomat has been murdered in a seedy motel outside Bangkok.  There are rumours of paedophilia.  Send in Harry Hole, ostensibly because he made his name with the Australian case but really because---  As always with Nesbo's intricately crafted plots, it's easy to give too much away.

The characters are brilliant - the American female inspector of Thai police with alopecia, the ageing black ops agent, the financial whizz kid and the budding paralympian diver who flirts outrageously with Harry.

Forget episode one - this a series best started with episode two.

Phantom - Jo Nesbo

As it says on the cover, the new Harry Hole thriller, and the best yet in my view.  Harry gets into the story good and early and there's no need for him to opt out of the official police investigation as he is no longer a policeman and the real cops have already closed their investigation.

Harry's excesses are understandable because the case is the only case that conceivably drag him away from his sober new life in Hong Kong.

I particularly admired the way Nesbo is prepared to take risks.  Who is this talking at the beginning and indeed all the way through.  Then we realise.  Then we realise who he is talking to.  Superb craftsmanship.  I can't think of anyone else who could pull it off so successfully.  The only comparison I can think of is Nesbo's standalone, The Headhunters, which is probably the best Nordic Noir novel ever.

After the disappointment of The Bat, which was juvenilia best left untranslated, Phantom came as a huge relief.  Nesbo on top form - unbeatable.  And the next Harry Hole, Police, is already out.  Let me at it!

The Bat - Jo Nesbo

This is the first Harry Hole, published in Norway as far back as 1997 but not translated into English until 2012.  When I first learnt The Bat existed, I wondered why hadn't they brought it out in America and the UK?  Having read it, I know why.  It isn't as good as whatever they started the English run with.

It's OK - better than OK and a good bit better than most other Nordic Noir thrillers that have been hurriedly published in the wake of Nesbo's success - but it is nowhere near as good as books like The Redeemer and The Leopard.  It is a million miles from the mighty Headhunters.  Frankly, I wish they hadn't bothered.

For starters, it isn't Nordic, it's Aussie with a guest Nord.  Harry has been flown off to the southern hemisphere after a minor Norwegian TV personality is murdered in Sydney.  This in itself is wholly implausible.  It quickly becomes irritating that the Australians can't pronounce Hole the Norwegian way and take to calling him Harry Holy.  Even Nesbo can't make a joke as thin as that last 374 pages.  There are long, tedious tracts of Aboriginal folklore which have no connection with the story and are there to show off Nesbo's research.  The red herring might as well wear a red herring hat it is so obvious he's not the killer and the real bad guy can be arrived at by the Agatha Christie method (i.e. who do we think is least likely to have done it?)  I finished the book less than twelve hours ago and have already forgotten why he did it.

For all that, the story moves along at an engaging pace, you get a lot of Harry's backstory, and Nesbo is always worth reading.  I believe there's another early Harry still to be translated.  I'd like to say I'll give it a miss, but I probably won't.

A Question of Belief - Donna Leon

A Question of Belief is the 19th Commissario Brunetti novel but the first to swim into my ken.  It is very different to much contemporary Eurocrime - there is nothing noir about it, nor is it particularly a police procedural.  It certainly isn't a thriller - we're virtually a third of the way through before anybody dies.  Yet it is compelling, the compulsion to continue arising from the recognition that you are in the presence of extremely developed characters created by a writer utterly immersed in her world.

In some senses it is old fashioned, certainly more Wallander than Harry Hole.  Venice is baking in the summer heat.  Everybody at the Questura is either on holiday already or imminently about to go on holiday.  Ispettore Vianello is worried about his aunt who has fallen under the thrall of a dodgy fortune-teller.  Toni Brusca from the Commune has uncovered worrying procedural errors at the Tribunale de Vezetia.  Cases are being ludicrously and unnecessarily delayed.  One name keeps appearing on the court documents, the usher Araldo Fortuna, a career civil servant well on his way to retirement who leaves quietly at home with his mother.  Then Fortuna is found dead, his head bashed in and semen in his rectum.  Holidays abandoned, Brunetti, Vianello and the indispensable Signorina Elettra investigate.

The plotting is so defly done it pretty much constitutes slieght of hand.  There is never a hint of the manipulation you so often get with traditional detective fiction.

I shall certainly be investigating others in the series.

The Devil's Star - Jo Nesbo

The downside of reading a Nesbo is that it means there's one less to look forward to reading.  The Devils Star is Harry Hole at his daunting best.  What I admire about Nesbo is that he manages to maintain the flavour of the series whilst always striving to expand his technique.  There is a scene here, where Harry pushes himself beyond mental and physical limits to try and figure out the killer's code which is superb - a man tripping out, alone in his flat, saying and doing nothing, yet you are completely spellbound.

The mystery is expertly handled, with a convincing red herring and a couple of clever chronology tricks that work especially well.  I certainly didn't guess who'd really done it until Nesbo told me.  And, as for where the killer hid the body of the missing victim ... noir at its blackest.

The Redbreast - Jo Nesbo

One of the earlier Harry Hole thrillers, The Redbreast is great fun to read but a tad disappointing in the denouement.  I understand the attraction of rooting the crime in Norway's bipolar wartime experience but the war element of the two-strand narrative collapses to pretty much nothing once you know the twist.  Unlike Headhunters, it is a bit of a cheat.  Even so, you have to read Redbreast to fully understand The Snowman, The Leopard etc.