Police - Jo Nesbo

    2013; 562 pages.  Book 10 (out of 13) in the “Harry Hole” series.  Translator: Don Bartlett.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Police Procedural; Crime Fiction; Mystery Thriller; Norway.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    Somebody recently murdered a retired detective in Oslo.  The killer must want to die since we know that the police department there won’t rest until they’ve found him and taken their revenge.  But now a second policeman’s been murdered.  Rather gruesomely.  Ski pole through the mouth. 

 

    Serial cop killer?  Copycat slaying?  A psychopathic two-man team?  Or maybe just a coincidence?

 

    Interestingly, both men were lured to, then executed at, the scenes of investigations that each had blundered many years ago.  These two present-day cop-slayings both occurred on the anniversaries of those two failed investigations.   So I think we can rule out coincidence.

 

    I sure wish Detective Harry Hole was here to aid in the probe.  These are just the sort of oddities he excelled in solving.  Alas, he’s left the police force for the better-paying life of a college lecturer.

 

    And he’s vowed never to return to his old profession.

 

What’s To Like...

    Police is the fourth book I’ve read from Jo Nesbo’s spellbinding police-procedural series featuring Harry Hole.  I’m not reading them in chronological order, so I wasn’t aware of Harry’s departure from the Oslo Police Force.

 

    Police is written in Jo Nesbo’s native Norwegian language, and translated into English by Don Bartlett.  “English” here does not mean “American”, and it’s always fun to run into strange spellings and terms such as: grey, whizz-kid, torch (“flashlight”), storey, matt (“matte”), spelt, whingeing, bedlinen, and my personal favorite: mozzie, which turns out to be the English slang for what we Yanks call a "mosquito".

 

    There’s a slew of musical references, some famous, others rather esoteric.  Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is cited several times, and IMO, appropriately so.  And there’s an eclectic mix of other bands/solo acts getting some well-deserved ink, including: Jay-Z, Decemberists, Rihanna, Merle Haggard, Talking Heads, and one of my favorite musicians: Steve Harley.

 

    The storyline is fast-paced; there are no slow spots.  The tale is told from multiple characters’ points-of-view, and Jo Nesbo’s writing and storytelling skills are sufficient to ensure that things never became confusing or boring.  It should come as no surprise that the cop killings don’t stop at two.  I’m proud to say I sniffed out a couple red herrings before the Norwegian detectives did, but like them, was amazed to realize those revelations still didn’t bring me any closer to determining the identity of the perp(s).

 

    Everything builds to a nail-biting climax.  The slayings are all eventually solved, but I guarantee you’ll never guess the baddie(s) and the motive(s), even though afterward, it will all seem logical and obvious.  The final chapter is a protracted epilogue which will first throw you a startling plot curve, then leave a lump in your throat, and finally make you want to go find and read the next book in the series.

 

Excerpts...

    Truls didn’t need to look at the papers, he had read them at home.  He had laughed out loud at Mikael’s feeble statement about where the investigation stood.  “At this moment in time it’s not possible to say . . .” and “There is no information regarding . . .”  They were sentences taken directly from the chapter about handling the press in Bjerknes and Hoff Johansen’s Investigative Methods, which had been a set text at Police College and in which it said police officers should use those generic quasi-sentences because journalists got so frustrated with “no comment.”  And also that they should avoid adjectives.  (pg. 61)

 

    “Did you know that in peacetime policemen are responsible for four per cent of all murders worldwide?  In the Third World the figure is nine per cent.  And that makes us the world’s most lethal occupational group.”

    “Wow,” Bjorn said.

    “He’s kidding,” Katrine said.  She pulled up a chair and placed a large cup of steaming tea on the table in front of her.  “When people use statistics, in seventy-two per cent of cases, they’ve made them up on the spur of the moment.”

    Harry laughed.

    “Is that funny?” Bjorn asked.

    “It’s a joke,” Harry said.  (pg. 391)

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Scrumping (v.) : stealing fruit, such as apples from trees.

Others: Trompe l’oeil (n.); Matt (adj.); Skint (adj.), Trainers (n.); Syncope (n.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 11,238 ratings and 2,221 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.23*/5, based on 43,274 ratings and 3,046 reviews.

 

“You look like someone’s pissed in your porridge.”  (pg. 92)

    It’s hard to find things to quibble about in Police.  This is a dark, gritty police procedural with a lot of violence and mature themes, plus a moderate amount of cussing: 20 instances in the first 20% of the book.  But that’s to be expected in any Jo Nesbo murder/thriller.

 

    Harry Hole is absent for the first 184 pages of the story; which is surprising, considering the series title uses his name.  It takes a bunch more pages before he’s persuaded to help in the investigation, but you knew that was going to happen since there are three more sequels after this in the series.  Also, I’m pretty sure, if I were reading these books in order, I’d have been aware of his departure from the force.

 

    There are numerous other references to characters and crimes from earlier books in the series, but I eventually sorted those out as well.  Small details were more of a challenge; Jo Nesbo expects you to know that Ila is a Norwegian jail, Violin is a kind of heroin, and Odessa is a Russian-made weapon.  Happily, I sussed out those as well.

 

    For me Police was another masterfully-constructed page-turner from Jo Nesbo.  I have three more novels from this series (all earlier than this one) on my Kindle, plus one book, Midnight Sun, from another of his series.  I’ve never yet been disappointed in reading anything by Jo Nesbo.

 

    9½ Stars.  Let’s hear it for the brief mention of joik, a traditional form of song performed by the Sami people in the Lapland region of Northern Europe.  It’s great stuff; go listen to some on YouTube.