The Leopard: A Harry Hole Novel Author: Jo Nesbo Don Bartlett | Language: English | ISBN:
B005KB0U04 | Format: EPUB
The Leopard: A Harry Hole Novel Description
“With Henning Mankell having written his last Wallander novel and Stieg Larsson no longer with us, I have had to make the decision on whom to confer the title of best current Nordic writer of crime fiction . . . Jo Nesbø wins.” —Marcel Berlins,
The Times (U.K.)
Two young women are found murdered in Oslo, both drowned in their own blood. Media coverage quickly reaches fever pitch: Could this be the work of a serial killer?
The crime scenes offer no coherent clues, the police investigation is stalled, and the one man who might be able to help doesn’t want to be found. Traumatized by his last case, Inspector Harry Hole has lost himself in the squalor of Hong Kong’s opium dens. Yet when he is compelled, at last, to return to Norway—his father is dying—Harry’s buried instincts begin to take over. After a female MP is discovered brutally murdered, nothing can keep him from the investigation.
There is little to go on: a piece of rope, a scrap of wool, a bit of gravel, an unexpected connection between the victims. And Harry will soon come to understand that he is dealing with a psychopath for whom “insanity is a vital retreat,” someone who will put him to the test—in both his professional and personal lives—as never before.
Ruthlessly intelligent and suspenseful,
The Leopard is Jo Nesbø’s most electrifying novel yet—absolutely gripping from first to last.
- File Size: 1780 KB
- Print Length: 690 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: B009BIJQAW
- Publisher: Vintage (December 13, 2011)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B005KB0U04
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,039 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Again and again, author Jo Nesbo throws so many surprises at you and in such rapid succession that the unexpected becomes (almost) expected.
In "The Leopard" a character says, "no one is as they seem, and most of life, apart from honest betrayal, is lies and deceit." The same could be said of the story and its many twists and reversals.
Two thirds the way through this big (600 hardback pages) everything seems to be wrapped up but you expect - and you'll be right on - that our Norwegian sleuth Harry Hole (pronounced Whole-Lay, if you please) has a lot more sleuthing to do and more mayhem to deal with before all is revealed and everything explained. American readers are at an added disadvantage because we need to deal with the Norwegian names and locales. As usual with a Nesbo crime thriller, I started taking notes as soon as I opened the book.
We meet up with Hole in Hong Kong where he's gone to wallow in guilt and misery and punish himself physically and mentally after the devastating events in "The Snowman." We also meet Kaja Solness, a member of the Oslo crime squad who has been dispatched to collect Hole and bring him back where he's needed to help solve a number of grisly murders that have all the earmarks of a serial killer.
I prefer some nuance in my thrillers, some mental stimulation, plot intricacies that require thought and the application of logic. I prefer to have more than just sensation, thrills and a high body count resulting from the use of truly gruesome, grisly devices designed for torture and murder.
In the "The Leopard," Nesbo stretches credulity and tests the bounds of plausibility with a nasty apple-sized killing device that registers nearly off the scale on the shock-horror meter.
I've read all of the books in the Harry Hole series that have been translated into English and I'm not crazy about the direction Nesb? is taking in the most recent titles, and particularly this one.
First, the good things. I admire Nesb?'s ability to depict broken people. He strips Harry down his soul, it seems, and makes us see the pain there. He's so good at showing the quiet, tender feelings Harry has for Rakel, Oleg, his father and some of the other people in his life. In this book, Nesb? gets into the complexities of Harry's relationship with his father, and this is very affecting. Nesb? has given us a lot of terrific female characters for Harry to work with over the course of this series, too: Ellyn, Beate, Katrine and now Kaja.
When I started reading the Harry Hole series, one thing that struck me was how well Nesb? got into the mind of the killer and made his actions comprehensible and sometimes even made him almost sympathetic. The murders were always very human murders.
Increasingly, I feel like Nesb? is getting away from the humanness in his killers and even, in a way, in Harry. Presenting us in recent books with serial killers and bizarre and elaborate murder methods is distancing. I feel like the books are becoming more sensationalistic and less real.
Every book requires the reader to have a certain suspension of disbelief. You enter the world the author has created, knowing it is fiction, but willing to go along with the story and identify with its people, time and place. Nesb? made that suspension of disbelief difficult for me with this book.
The long scenes of gruesome torture and murder seem like something out of an exploitation movie and are alienating to me.
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