The Leopard

Starred review from November 7, 2011
In Nesbø’s outstanding follow-up to The Snowman (May 2011), Insp. Harry Hole reluctantly agrees to return home from Hong Kong, where he’s been hiding out for months, after an Oslo Crime Squad colleague tells him his father is in the hospital. Considered an expert after catching the serial killer known as the Snowman, Harry is marginally intrigued by the possibility of another serial killer loose in Oslo. Back in Norway, little links two murdered women except the unusual stab wounds in their mouths. When a mid-level politician’s body is discovered in a possible suicide that’s soon dubbed murder, Hole realizes a single killer is at work and not yet done. Nesbø moves the action easily from Hong Kong to Norway, with side trips to the Democratic Republic of Congo, without ever losing the plot’s sense of urgency. Hole, put through the emotional wringer in The Snowman, doesn’t get much of a reprieve in this intense outing. By the end, he’s ready to concede that what he most wants is “an armored heart.”

Starred review from November 15, 2011
Another spooky gothic by Norwegian gloomster Nesbø (The Snowman, 2011, etc.), the poet laureate of boreal psychopathy. If there were a dictionary-definition image for numbed world-weariness, Oslo detective Harry Hole would be it, in just the way that Edvard Munch's The Scream is the canonical image of terror. (When the film is made, only the Stellan Skarsgård of Insomnia will do.) As Nesbø's newest procedural opens, Hole has taken himself into a Hong Kong exile, where he ponders the smog that builds up thicker and thicker from mainland China and fills his own modest room with the smoke from his opium water pipe. Enter Kaja Solness, Oslo gumshoe extraordinaire, who needs to find him immediately. Naturally, something very ugly has happened back home; a murder bloody enough to make a Viking of yore lose his lunch has occurred, involving a cruel instrument of torture that shoots out metal spikes: "Two needles pierced the windpipe and one the right eye, one the left. Several needles penetrated the rear part of the palate and reached the brain." Yuck. Only Hole, it seems, can divine the mind of someone sick enough to pull off such a thing, and once Hole, plagued by the memories of earlier murders and a constant craving for drink and smoke, is pulled into the case early on in the novel, it's all a go-go-go rush across the continents: Europe, of course, and Asia, but also Africa, where an ugly war is raging off in some backwater of the Congo and where, it develops, a person of interest is conducting a nasty trade. It is vintage Nesbø to throw in red herrings and MacGuffins, but also to have Hole engage in a little John Woo–style dance, cop and suspect, in which the bad guy has a definite chance of taking out the good one. Nesbø's formula includes plenty of participation by Kaja, a very capable woman, and plenty of current geopolitical backdrop, making Nesbø a worthy mysterian-cum-social-critic in the Stieg Larsson tradition. But will good prevail? It's anything but a foregone conclusion. Good for a nightmare or three--a taut, fast-paced thriller with wrenching twists and turns.

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Starred review from December 1, 2011
Oslo police detective Harry Hole, Nesb's obsessive hero, jumps on and off the wagon with all the manic intensity of a kid riding a pogo stick. This time, after the horrendous events detailed in The Snowman (his lover, Rakel, and her son taken captive by a serial killer), Harry's self-flagellating leap off the wagon has carried him from Oslo to Hong Kong, where he is mixing his opium and his Scotch with reckless, delirium-inducing abandon. However, back in Oslo, Harry's father is dying, and another serial killer is on the loose. Lured by the formerhe professes disinterest in the latterHarry returns to Norway, takes a hiatus from booze and dope, and lands in the middle of multiple messes, not all of his own making. There's the matter of sorting out his feelings for his father and his tangled past, including the still-open sore of losing Rakel yet again; there's the question of new feelings for a fellow detective, Kaja; there's the interdepartmental power struggle in which he seems to have become a pawn; and, yes, there's the serial killer, a particularly nasty fellow who employs all manner of despicable tools to dispatch his victims. Harry can't resist the lure of an impregnable puzzle, of course, and soon his obsessive self is on the rampage. Just as we wonder if Nesb finally has played out the theme of Harry versus his demons (inner and outer), we are sucked in again, drawn by the specter of a good man undone by a bad world and a too-sensitive soul. What Harry craves, he tells us, is an armored heart. We could use one, too, if we ever hope to turn away from the adventures of crime fiction's most tortured and compelling hero. Alas, no armor exists strong enough to keep Harry from his demons, or the rest of us from Harry. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Nesbo's books have been translated into 40 languages and sold more than eight million copies worldwide. This one stands to up the ante one more time.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)