In this seventh novel in the Harry Hole series to be translated into English, author Jo Nesbo, with over eleven million thrillers in print, continues to detail Harry’s fight against the symbolic “white whales” of injustice. Here, all Harry’s experience and knowledge as an Oslo policeman are readied for the biggest fight of his life, one to which he willingly makes a complete emotional commitment. Though he has lived in Hong Kong in self-imposed exile for three years, Harry has just learned that Oleg, the son of Rakel, the love of his life, is now jailed on remand in Oslo for the murder of a drug dealer and is, surprisingly, a drug addict himself. Harry himself has always had problems with alcohol, bureaucratic nonsense, and self-control, even during his career with the Oslo Police, and he has battle scars, both visible and invisible, which have made him a cynical man. He immediately returns to Oslo to review the case, hoping that he can save Oleg, who has always thought of him as “Dad.” Now “clean,” Harry sets to work to find out more about Oleg’s involvement in this case that he must win.
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Much admired by both Roberto Bolano and by Carlos Fuentes, Mexican author Daniel Sada has now been published in English for the first time by Graywolf Press. Almost Never, “a Rabelaisian tale of lust and longing,” provides a bawdy and mildly satiric look at the whole concept of machismo as it exists in the mid-1940s in Mexico. Sada’s main character, Demetrio Sordo, almost thirty when the novel opens in 1945, grew up in northern Mexico, but he has recently been living near Oaxaca in southern Mexico, working as an agronomist in charge of a large ranch. Bored by the usual nightly “entertainments,” he finally concludes that “Sex was the most obvious option.” Taking a taxi to a local brothel, he meets the beautiful brunette Mireya. His eye-opening relationship with her, graphically described, comes to a temporary stop, however, when he receives a letter from his mother in Parras, asking him to come home at Christmas to accompany her to a wedding in Sacramento, even farther away to the north. There he meet and falls in love with a strictly virginal local girl, Renata. The story with all its complications and bawdy language mocks the pretensions of its characters at the same time that it explains and even, in some cases, tries to justify them in terms of the social context of the period. A new Mexican author of great esteem, now translated into English for the first time.
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Anyone who is already a fan of Jo Nesbo and his nail-biting Nordic noir mysteries will enjoy this non-stop, action-packed continuation of the Harry Hole series. Many of the familiar characters (and enemies) are back as Harry is persuaded to return from Hong Kong, where he has been spending his “hiatus” from the Oslo Crime Squad in an alcoholic haze. He is now in debt to the Hong Kong Triad, which as taken his passport to prevent his leaving without paying his debts. Three gruesome murders have taken place back in Oslo while he has been gone, however, and investigators are exploring the possibility of yet another serial killer on the loose. Harry Hole is the best in the business in tracking down serial killers, having just resolved the case of The Snowman, a particularly vicious killer of women, and the Oslo Crime Squad wants him back. By far the most complicated of the Harry Hole novels so far, this one is a special challenge at six hundred eleven pages, and readers of The Snowman will have an advantage in understanding some of the characters who reappear here.
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Utu, winner of multiple prizes and set in New Zealand, is dark and full of violence, and depends on the internal conflicts within a country for their dramatic impact and plot. Longstanding resentments between an upper ruling class, and the dispossessed original residents of the country, the Maori, who were conquered during the colonial period, dominate the plot which involves many characters, both white and Maori. The plot becomes so complex that at several points in the novel, the author actually backs up and has a character go over the details so far, to remind himself and the reader about what is happening. Though the novel may be considered by some to be powerful and dramatic, it gains its power largely through its shock value, through the over-the-top reactions of presumably civilized people, well connected to the Auckland mainstream, who are intent on gaining what they want when they want it. While some may consider main character Paul Osborne to be an “anti-hero” (and his actions to represent mainstream “noir”), my own feeling is that there is a difference between the “unsentimental depiction of violence,” one of the main characteristics of noir, and violence for its own sake, which is what I saw here.
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Set in Oslo in 1961, author Roy Jacobsen tells the story of Finn, a small boy of about nine, and his divorced, and later widowed, mother as they cope with life’s hard realities. Extremely close, they struggle to make ends meet, his mother always making it a point to be at home when he returns from school, and working only part-time at a shoe store. Finn’s “hard realities” become much harder when circumstances force his mother to rent out his room to a boarder. One interview with a potential boarder is so intense that she closes the door on Finn and conducts it in private, learning that the woman is not a potential boarder but her ex-husband’s second wife, the mother of Finn’s half-sister Linda. She does not share any of this information with Finn, but she is preoccupied and tense for weeks afterward. When his mother finally admits that not only does he have a half-sister named Linda but that the strange little girl will be moving in with them immediately, Finn’s world crashes, and he begins his journey toward understanding of himself, his mother, and life in general. Filled with surprises and shocks.
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