A huge fan of Jo Nesbo books, I couldn’t believe Midnight Sun (Blood on the Snow #2) had somehow slipped under my radar. Published late last year, it tells the story of Jon, a troubled young man who, through a series of circumstances told retrospectively, is on the run and in fear of his life. Fleeing to the utmost north, the land of the Midnight Sun, he hopes to avoid the deadly repercussions of one of Oslo’s most feared Underworld figures: the Fisherman.
Finding himself in a small town run by an unusual religious sect and where tensions are high, Jon seeks solace and safety in a remote cabin. Only, solitude gives him time to ponder what he’s done and where his future might lie as well as to consider the very real attractions of not only the little township (where everybody knows your name), but the newly widowed Lea and her son, Knut. It also enables him to recognise that when there is a price to be paid for perceived disloyalty and those out to extract it are professional killers, safety is an illusion.
While I enjoyed this book very much, I felt it was somewhat lacking in terms of … what? Characterisation, perhaps… plot, maybe? I am uncertain. Nesbo is such a great writer and his plots are normally dense and tight and so believable, especially when they’re most thrilling. Likewise, his characters are rich and complex, even with his one-offs. This book, however, was comparatively quite ordinary. That’s not to say it wasn’t good, it was. But the emotional depths that usually make his books a stand out were mostly absent. So much so, certain things develop too quickly to be anything but convenient narrative devices that push the story along. While there is a clever plot twist, it too is not so much remarkable but implausible as the story becomes more Disney than Nordic noir.
All in all, a sound read, but not one of Nesbo’s strongest.
Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series, I approached this stand alone novel, The Son, with a degree of reluctance. Initially, I found my misgivings (that Nesbo hadn’t written another Hole book) founded as the story was a bit slow to start and, for me, difficult to engage with. Then, whoompa! The tale of Sonny Lofthus, a drug addicted but strangely charismatic prisoner (who absolves other hardened inmates of their sins), whose policeman father committed suicide many years ago after being exposed as a corrupt cop, is a high-octane and compelling read. As the story progresses, we learn that after his dad’s death, the once promising and talented Lofthus spiralled into crime and drugs and when the book opens, seems content with the bottom upon which he currently dwells. A bottom that sees him taking drugs and responsibility for all sorts of crimes – even those that occur outside the prison walls and which extend his sentence into perpetuity… As long as he is given the drugs that hasten forgetfulness and ennui, he doesn’t give a damn….
first person narrative contains the usual Nesbo flair for thrilling plots populated by ghastly villains and miscellaneous others who exit and enter, the characters in Headhunters failed to leave an impression. Part of the reason for this, I think, is because from the outset, they are quite superficial. The lead character and POV of the novel, headhunter and part-time art thief, Roger Brown, is a narcissistic prat (and unattractive – in the psychological and emotional sense – anti-hero) who boasts about not only the way he can read people, but practically every other element of his life: his outstanding reputation in his main gig as a corporate headhunter, his grasp of FBI interrogation techniques and perfection of them, his beautiful art-gallery owner wife, his hair, his manner of dress etc. etc. While he tries to suggest he is comfortable with his relatively short stature, there is also a sense in which he does protest too much and the reader cannot help but think that Roger works hard to overcompensate. This is something that, in many ways, holds true when he meets the more than capable former executive and soldier Clas Greve, and decides he might be a suitable candidate for a top job. But when Roger learns that this man also owns an original Rubens, the cocky Roger decides to risk another job on the side; only, he ends up risking more than he ever bargained for and a deadly cat and mouse game, a head-hunting of a different and very final kind, ensues.
is such a hard book to review because even the smallest detail about the content – the way the story unfolds (which can be very persuasive in a review) – runs the risk of spoiling what is an absolute cracker of an addition to the Harry Hole canon. All I can say is that the narrative didn’t begin as I anticipated at all, even though it follows on from the events in the last book, The Leopard, and it’s this defying of expectations that sets the standard and pace for the rest of the tale. As Police opens, we’re back in Oslo, there are grisly murders a-plenty only, this time, the stakes are even higher as it’s members of the force that are being killed. Not only that, but their deaths are a brutal reenactment of cold cases – cases that the new victims were once assigned to solve. As the body count grows, so does the pressure and the fear – who will be next and why?
