This is a recent release by an author who has gotten some significant Scandinavian awards for his earlier books, including the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel, an award that was won by both Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson. It had a great write up in the LA Times last Sunday and Michael Connelly gave it a very strong endorsement. Eager for a new author, I gave it a try. It had the usual elements that have attracted us to this genre: a strong male hero and police detective, Harry Hole, who has his faults (a struggle with alcoholism), but who has a strong ethical obsession to solve crimes regardless of who it might hurt; a curious and conflicted love interest; a serial murder; and lots of false leads and twists in the plot. Maybe it was because I was too busy with other work when I started the book and took a week to finish it, but it only rarely really grabbed my attention. I definitely was able to put it down until the last 100 pages. And, even for those of us that are very forgiving as to plot manipulations, Nesbo made a few maneuvers with his characters that were too much for me to swallow. This was not a bad book, just not a great one, and I’m not particularly motivated to pick up another one of Nesbo’s works.
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