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.

Cockroaches - Jo Nesbo

   1987 (in Norwegian), 2013 (in English); 437 pages.  Book 2 (out of 12) in the “Harry Hole” series.  New Author? :No.  Genres : Crime Fiction; Mystery Thriller; Thailand.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    It’s a delicate diplomatic situation.  The Norwegian ambassador to Thailand has been murdered.  Someone stuck a knife into his back.

 

    Unfortunately, it didn’t happen at the Embassy, nor the Ambassador’s residence.  It took place instead in a seedy motel room.  The kind you rent to “meet” a cute little hooker.  So says the motel manager who rented him the room.  So says the hooker who discovered the corpse.

 

    The Norwegian government has decided to send Detective Harry Hole to Bangkok to investigate.  His primary mission is not necessarily to solve the murder; that’s neither here nor there.  Rather, it’s to make sure that the embarrassing details of the case are covered up and kept out of the newspapers.  And they’ve drummed that repeatedly into Harry’s head.

 

    Unfortunately, Harry has a history of having trouble obeying orders from higher-ups.

 

What’s To Like...

    Cockroaches is the second book in Jo Nesbo’s fantastic Harry Hole series.  Book One, The Bat, is set in Australia, (and reviewed here); this time Harry and the reader are treated to a trip to Thailand.  It was fifteen years before Cockroaches was translated into English.  By that we mean “The Queen’s English”, not the American variant, so we have strange spellings such as kilometres, defenceless, and aluminium; and weird terms such as torches (flashlights), windscreens (windshields) and hoovering (vacuuming).

 

    Many years ago, I spent three days in Thailand, and I can attest that Jo Nesbo does a fantastic job in capturing the “feel” of Bangkok here: the heat, the humidity, the tuk-tuks, the unbelievable amount and diversity of the city’s daily traffic, and the national pride that Thais have in being the only Southeast Asian country that was never a European colony.  It’s all real, even the ubiquitous pimps showing foreigners pictures of their "working girls".

 

    The Mystery aspect of the story is done equally well.  It quickly becomes clear that this is not merely a “call-girl tryst gone bad", and it was fun tagging along with Harry as he doggedly – and against his superiors’ wishes – tries to get to the bottom of the murder.  Some key clues pop up along the way, but properly interpreting them is quite challenging, and a couple of them are red herrings intended to mislead.

 

    In addition to the British-English terms, we get to learn some words and phrases in both Thai and Norwegian, and I always like that.  One of the latter was “faen” a Norse cussword, which I’ll let you google to find out what it means.  Harry’s musical tastes are impeccable: at one point he wears a Joy Division T-shirt, and he also makes reference to the obscure prog-rock band Camel, whom I greatly like.  He also attends his first quasi-legal cockfight, which was enlightening for me as well.

 

    Everything builds to an excellent ending that’s full of both excitement and twists.  Harry’s keen crime-solving logic saves the day; to be honest I still didn’t have a clue who did it when he broke the case.  All the storylines are seemingly tied up, although there’s a teaser on the last page to make you think twice about that.  Cockroaches is both a standalone novel and part of a series.

 

Excerpts...

    ”His career has ended in a cul-de-sac.  He came from some job in Defence, but at some point there were a couple too many “buts” by his name.”

    “Buts?”

    “Haven’t you heard the way Ministry people talk about one another? ‘He’s a good diplomat, but he drinks, but he likes women too much’ and so on.  What comes after the ‘buts’ is a lot more important than what comes before; it determines how far you can get in the department.  That’s why there are so many sanctimonious mediocrities at the top.”  (pg. 117)

 

    “What is it about you Thais and heights?  According to Tonje Wiig I’m the third Norwegian to be thrown out of a house this week.”

    “An old mafia modus operandi.  They’d rather do that than plug someone with lead.  If the police find a guy beneath a window they cannot rule out the possibility that he might have fallen accidentally.  Some money changes hands, the case is shelved without anyone being directly criticised and everyone’s happy.  Bullet holes complicate matters.”  (pg. 130)

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Ludic (adj.) : showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness.

Others: Alopecia (n.); Bodger (n.); Trainers (n., shoes).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.3*/5, based on 3,800 ratings and 1,478 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.73*/5, based on 50,252 ratings and 3,018 reviews.

 

“Who on earth pays half a million for a tape recorder?”  (pg. 146)

    There’s not much to gripe about in Cockroaches.  Be aware that this is a gritty, police-noir series, so there’s a fair amount of cussing (18 instances in the first 20%), violence, and adult situations, including one roll-in-the-hay.

 

    Despite all its positive attributes, Bangkok is also known as a center for child-pornography and pedophilia.  Both raise their ugly heads in Cockroaches.  Don’t read this book if this is going to upset you.

 

    About the only other thing I can quibble about is the choice of title.  I only recall two instances of cockroaches making the scene, and neither was important to the story.  I think I’m happier that they didn’t have a greater impact.

 

    9 Stars.  I still maintain that the best police-procedural murder-mysteries are written by Scandinavian authors: Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo, Jo Nesbo, and others.  Cockroaches does nothing to dissuade me from that lofty opinion.

The Bat - Jo Nesbo

    1997; 369 pages (English translation from the Norwegian in 2012 by Don Bartlett).  Book One  (out of 11, and soon to be 12) in the Inspector Harry Hole series.  New Author? : No.  Murder-Mystery; Police Procedural; Norwegian Crime Noir.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    It’s undoubtedly the longest business trip in Harry Hole’s career with the Oslo Crime Squad.  All the way from the northwestern European country of Norway to the tip of southeastern Australia, with only one single plane-change in Bahrain.  That's a lot of sitting.  Harry's back was killing him when he finally made it to Sydney.

    Let’s just hope it’s not a wasted trip.  A young, pretty, minor Norwegian TV celebrity has been brutally raped and murdered in Sydney, and Harry has been sent to “assist” in the case.

    Understandably, the Australian police force are somewhat lukewarm about having some foreigner looking over their shoulders.  The Head of the local Crime Squad, Neil McCormack, immediately puts Harry on a short leash.  Harry will do no independent investigating and he will report any and all thoughts or findings he has about the case at once to McCormack.

    Ah, but Harry has a history for bucking orders from his superiors.  You can bet your sweet didgeridoo that he’s not going to play by McCormack’s rules.

    Because there wouldn’t be much of a story if he did.

What’s To Like...

    The Bat is the first book in Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series, and, since Harry's already a veteran cop, there is a fair amount of time spent on his backstory, which contains a fair amount of uncomfortable baggage.  He conforms to the standard, anti-hero, police-procedural protagonist – he’s jaded, somewhat burnt out, drinks and smokes a lot, gets into bar fights, and  doesn’t follow the wishes of higher-ups well.  As a reader, I’m okay with that.

    I liked the way the setting, Sydney and its immediate environs, was handled.  I felt like the author had spent some time there, instead of just pulling data from the Wikipedia article.  And for a change, the Sydney opera house doesn’t play a part in the story.

    The translation is written in English, not American, which means you have car “boots”, things are “posh”, the carpet gets “hoovered”, and you use a “torch” to see your way around in the dark.  You also learn the proper way way pronounce Harry’s last name: “HOO-leh”.   I naturally assumed it was a one-syllable, long-O word; and most of the Aussies he meets just call him “Harry Holy”.  I also enjoyed the Aussieisms used: “fair dinkum”, “drongo”, and a couple others listed below in the Kewlest New Words section.

     Besides the main storyline questions – who killed Inger Holter?, was it a serial killer?, did it involve drugs? – the book examines the more serious themes of: the deep-seated prejudice against aboriginals, and the self-destructive woes of being an alcoholic.  The pacing is brisk, which will always be a challenge when writing a crime-mystery tale of 350+ pages.  Jo Nesbo works a number of aboriginal folk lore tales into the tale, as well as some hookers, flashers, and the Sydney gay community.

    This is my second Harry Hole book (the other one is reviewed here), and I was once again impressed with the author’s wit and writing skills.  The fight scene (pages 132-134) was particularly fun to read.  Harry Hole books are for adults – there’s lots of cussing, gruesome murders, and oodles of sex, drugs, and booze.  The Bat is a standalone story, as well as part of a series.  There are 57 chapters covering 369 pages, so if it’s time to turn off the lights and go to sleep, you're probably seven pages or less from a chapter break.

Kewlest New Word...

Fair Dinkum (phrase, Aussieism) : used to emphasize or seek confirmation of the genuineness or truth of something.

Others : Kip (v.; a Britishism); Twig (v.; a Gaelicism); Spliff (n.); Snaffling (v.); Squiz (v.; a Britishism).

Excerpts...

    “Mr. White, a woman whom you knew well and with whom you had an intimate relationship has just been murdered.  What you might or might not feel about that is not our business.  However, as you are no doubt aware, we are looking for a murderer, and unless you try to help us this very minute, we will be forced to have you taken to the police station in Sydney.”

    “I’m going to Sydney anyway so if that means you’ll pay for my plane ticket, fine by me.”  (pg. 71)

    “Where do you think (he) will end up?”

    “What do you mean?”

    “Do you think his soul will go up or down?”

    Toowoomba wore a serious expression.  “I’m a simple man, Harry.  I don’t know much about that kind of thing, and I don’t know much about souls.  But I do know a couple of things about (him), and if there’s something up there, and if it’s beautiful souls they want that’s where he belongs.”  He smiled.  “But if there’s anything down there, I think that’s where he’d prefer to be.  He hated boring places.”  (pg. 288)

”We’re living in Sydney, the only town in the world where people are closet heteros.”  (pg. 175)

    It helps to realize that The Bat is a Police Procedural, not a Whodunit.  You can try to solve the murder(s) by walking alongside Harry, and you might even catch some critical clues that Harry later kicks himself for not recognizing sooner.  But the information learned from those clues is not given until Harry announces the identity of the perpetrator.

    That occurs on page 322, at which point, the final fifty pages switches from “who did it” to “how are we going to nab em”.  The finale has an obligatory chase scene, is suitably exciting, and finishes off with an ending that, IMO, is just a bit over the top.

    Some Amazon reviewers give The Bat low ratings, most of them saying that it’s one of the weakest books in the series.  This was only my second Jo Nesbo book, so I don’t feel qualified to comment one way or another on that.  For me, The Bat was an exciting book that kept me turning the pages.

    8½ Stars.   Scandinavian authors kick butt when it comes to writing murder-mystery stories.  Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and the team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo are all masters in this genre.  And now Jo Nesbo can be added to that list.

The Snowman - Jo Nesbo

    2011; 530 pages.  Book Seven  (out of 11) in the Inspector Harry Hole series  New Author? : Yes.  Murder-Mystery; Police Procedural; Scandinavian Crime Noir.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

    Birte Becker, wife of Professor Filip Becker, and mother of a teenage son named Jonas, has disappeared.  Inspector Harry Hole of the Oslo police suspects foul play, although the possibility of her running off willingly, say, to be with a lover in an affair, cannot be dismissed, since there’s no sign of a forced entry or of any violence in the Becker household

    The only thing out of the ordinary in the case so far is Birte’s pink scarf.  Someone, maybe Birte herself, has draped it around the neck of a snowman in the front yard.  The snowman’s nothing special, a carrot nose, a stick for an arm, and some black stones for the eyes and mouth.  But curiously, Jonas says he didn’t build it.

    So who did?  And why?

What’s To Like...

    The Snowman is a police-procedural murder-mystery set in the greater Oslo, Norway area.  There is some jumping around of the timing – 1980, 1992, and 2004 (the present) – but it doesn’t get confusing because Jo Nesbo alerts you to any change in the “where and when” at the beginning of each chapter.

    Harry Hole is your standard antihero protagonist.  He drinks too much, smokes too much, has his moments of arrogance, and can be lippy to superiors and bossy to subordinates at ill-advised times.  But he’s also the best detective on the police force, and there’s even a possibility that the murderer is deliberately baiting him with clues and messages in order to make this a personal duel.

    The storyline is laid out perfectly, and I greatly appreciate that in any murder mystery.  There’s a slew of characters to meet and grow suspicious about, and numerous red herrings to trip up Hole and the rest of the police department.  Indeed, both they (and I) frequently jumped the gun in thinking they’d caught the killer, only to have to eat their words when it turned out to be not so.  These “false trails” are essential for keeping a 500-page novel from suffering from slow spots, and it worked nicely here.

    There are some neat details.  Harry’s (and/or the author’s) musical tastes are excellent, with some quick nods to Slipknot, Michael Stipe (REM), the little-known Jason and The Scorchers, and the overture to Also Sprach Zarathustra.  You’ll learn about Fahr’s Syndrome (wiki it), and the obscure winter sport of Curling.  I also became aware of a culture twitch in Scandinavia – apparently they like to pride themselves for being too civilized to have a serial killer running around.  Such savagery is confined to the more primitive parts of the world, like America.

    The ending might be called "standard" – the real killer is found out, but escapes for an action-packed finale.  Yet it was done so well, I didn’t mind that it was formulaic.  There is some cussing, as would be expected in a gritty police procedural, and some sex, so you probably shouldn’t let little Jimmy and Susie read The Snowman.  The is a standalone novel, as well as part of an 11-book series.

Excerpts...

    “Anyway, where did he get hold of this loop gizmo?  If it isn’t approved, I mean?”

    “We can start looking there,” Harry said.  “Would you check that out, Skarre?”

    “I said I don’t believe all that stuff.”

    “Sorry, I didn’t make myself clear.  I meant to say: Check it out, Skarre.  Anything else, Holm?”  (loc. 1643)

    “You didn’t like Starship Troopers?”

    “That’s because it’s a crap macho film.”

    “It’s satire,” Harry said.

    “Of what?”

    “American society’s inherent fascism.  The Hardy Boys meet Hitler Youth.”

    “Come on, Harry.  War on giant insects on a remote planet?”

    “Fear of foreigners.”  (loc. 2208)

Kindle Details...

    The Snowman sells for $9.99 at Amazon, although I picked it up when it was temporarily discounted.  The other books in the series go for $5.99-$13.99.  Jo Nesbo also has a series of e-books for kids, all involving, of all things, farts.  These go for $6.99-$7.57.

If every baby was a perfect miracle, life was basically a process of degeneration.”  (loc. 6922)

    I’ve been wanting to check out Jo Nesbo’s series for quite some time now, since I’m a huge fan of Scandinavian Police Procedurals, and the Swedish contingent thereof – Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo, are sadly all dead or retired.

    It is every bookaholic’s delight to discover a new author that fully meets his hopes and expectations, and Jo Nesbo was exactly that sort of find for me.  The writing, translating, and storyline in The Snowman were all great, and I’m thrilled to pieces to have a whole new series, with a burnt-out protagonist and a detective team that isn’t above squabbling, to solve cases alongside.

    9½ Stars.  Time to hit my local library and see how many Jo Nesbo book/e-books they have.