Saturday, April 11, 2015

Jo Nesbo, in ‘Blood on Snow,’ Tries a New Kind of Hero


Credit Patricia Wall/The New York Times
Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole novels have established him as perhaps the noirest of Scandinavia’s current wave of noir writers. Harry is, as Mr. Nesbo has noted, a “kind of black hole, where everything is kind of pulled in, and nothing escapes.” A brilliant Oslo police detective, Harry is also a troubled lone wolf who has a lot in common with the criminals he pursues.

In “The Snowman,” Mr. Nesbo describes Harry as staring into “others’ faces to find their pain, their Achilles’ heels, their nightmares, motives and reasons for self-deception, listening to their fatiguing lies and trying to find a meaning in what he did: imprisoning people who were already imprisoned inside themselves. Prisons of hatred and self-contempt he recognized all too well.”

Mr. Nesbo’s latest novel, “Blood on Snow,” is not a Harry Hole book. Instead of examining the dark side of a man on the right side of the law, Mr. Nesbo tries here to depict the tender side of a murderer wanted by the police — a Norwegian hit man named Olav, who works as a “fixer” for a drug and prostitution mob boss named Daniel Hoffmann. The result, alas, is an ungainly, mannered — and unbelievable — story that’s saccharine where it’s meant to be moving, contrived where it’s supposed to be suspenseful.
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