I can't remember why I bought this book... perhaps the cover patch that proclaimed "The Next Stieg Larsson". In the long run it is a book that will not disappoint those who want an over-the-top crime drama with lots of sex, but I found it wanting on a number of levels.
The detective Harry Hole (pronounced Heu-leh) appears in several of Nesbo's books. In this lengthy yarn Harry Hole is now considered a maverick by his superiors... someone who had gained considerable media attention when he successfully nailed a serial killer. Years have passed, and Hole now has a reputation for being an alcoholic and for an obsession with seeing serial killers where none exist.
Inevitably events start to point towards the existence of an intelligent, calculating serial killer who has been killing for years undetected. Nesbo creates a perfect flurry of misdirection... in fact a great deal of the book consists of deliberately setting up possible conclusions to the hunt (at least one is announced to the media) only to have Hole realise at the last moment that it cannot be the solution. The reader is fairly confident about this as well as a third of the book or more is still to be read. The misdirection uses several devices. One character is far more closely connected to the crimes than anyone realises, other parts of the story are told with deliberately missing information or context to encourage the reader to presume they are reading about a crime when in fact the events are harmless or unconnected. The story is told with several lurches into the past, and when this is combined with the difficulty I experienced keeping track of unfamiliar Nordic names, I found myself literally loosing the plot at times.
The characters do have their interesting moments. I thought some of the dialogue between Hole and his new assistant Katrine was intelligently handled, but this was rather spoiled by later developments affecting Katrine. I can't decide whether it was a bonus or a problem that several elements of the main plot and misdirection were based on psychiatric issues, in particular issues connected with rare diseases. The connection between a particular disease and the serial killer's modus operandi was actually intriguing, but is not revealed until the end of the book.
The sexual interaction of various characters is a strong secondary focus of the book. The sub-theme is set early as one character quotes a statistic that only 80% of children are actually fathered by the mother's married partner... so there are a number of secondary stories of unfaithfulness. I was relieved that the sexual variations encompassed were not especially shocking.... one of the reasons I have decided not to read the third of Larsson's books is the particularly vile sex crimes he describes in detail. Still, I had a sense that the author placed too much trust in sexual encounters and crime drama to hold his audience, when more attention to character and character growth might have allowed me to tolerate the heavy handed misdirections.
This is great read for someone who demands sex and sensation from a crime story... and the story is ultimately simply about the pursuit of a criminal by a detective. If you long for genuinely unexpected twists (as opposed to blatant cross trails) and for characters with a rich and intriguing life of their own, then other sources will need to be perused.
Andrew Lack
No comments:
Post a Comment