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Summary
Summary
The victims are carefully chosen. The locations former crime scenes. The killings no accident. The target: police. After recovering from a near fatal shooting, Harry Hole has finally retired from active duty. He hears about the case but keeps his distance, determined to protect those he loves from the danger that he can never seem to escape.But as the media pressure intensifies, Harry finds himself advising an unofficial task force investigating the murders. Drawn into a dangerous web of cold cases and precarious allegiances, Harry can't guarantee protection for anyone. Least of all himself.
Author Notes
Jo Nesbø was born on March 29, 1960 in Molde, Norway. He graduated from the Norwegian School of Economics with a degree in economics and business administration. He worked as a freelance journalist and a stockbroker before he began his writing career. He is the author of The Harry Hole series and The Doctor Proctor series. The 2011 film Headhunters is based on his novel Hodejegerne (The Headhunters). In 2017 he made The New York Times Best Seller List with his title, The Thirst. He is also the main vocalist and songwriter for the Norwegian rock band Di Derre.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The life of Insp. Harry Hole, who was shot in the head by his surrogate son in the finale of 2012's Phantom, hangs in the balance for much of Nesbo's powerful 10th novel featuring the Oslo homicide cop. Secondary players who have helped out along the way step into the spotlight: forensics expert and facial-recognition whiz Beate Lonn; the brilliant but psychologically unstable detective Katrine Bratt; Harry's longtime friend Bjorn Holm; and the slippery new police chief, Mikael Bellman. The police force itself is at stake when it becomes apparent that the seemingly unrelated deaths of police officers are actually part of a larger pattern: each officer was slain at the site of an unsolved crime. In Nesbo's able hands, Harry's absence is a character unto itself, but this will only make readers more eager to learn Harry's fate. Author tour. 150,000-copy announced first printing. Agent: Niclas Salomonsson, Salomonsson Agency (Sweden). (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Having upped the ante with the previous novel in the Harry Hole series, the author goes for broke here. Arguably the most densely packed and ambitiously plotted novel in a series that has been getting darker with each volume, the tenth novel featuring Harry Hole is a companion sequel to its predecessor (Phantom, 2012). That book had left the former Oslo detective no longer a member of the police force and perhaps no longer alive. The publication of a new Hole novel removes the "spoiler alert," though for the first third of the novel, Harry exists more as a memory or an inspiration than as a character. The audacity of the author's vision here is that Hole is but one of a number of characters who might be living, might be dead, might even be some sort of ghostly spirits. There's a religious dimension to the plot twists of death and rebirth, of man playing god, both the redeemer and the avenger. The basic plot, not that there's anything basic about it, is that a series of gruesome crimes have remained unsolved for years, though DNA testing offers new possibilities. The police who investigated the original crimes and failed to solve them are lured back to the murder scenes, on the anniversaries of the murders, and are then themselves killed in an equally gruesome manner. Is the killer the same as the first, covering his tracks? Or is he "an apostle of righteousness," an agent of justice, insisting that those who failed to solve the crimes must pay for them? Is it even possible that the one stalking police is himself a member of the force, revolted at the corruption that those who read the previous novel know now extends to the top? Or is he part of that corruption? Casualties spawn new theories, as those thought dead turn out to be alive (and vice versa), and the complexities suggest that "the human brain is a four-dimensional labyrinth. Everyone's been there; no one knows the way." A surprise ending promises a fresh start for a series that had appeared to end with its previous novel.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Three shots fired at point-blank range. Harry Hole has to be dead, doesn't he? And, yet, here is a new Harry Hole novel, not an earlier installment of the series published out of order. Ever since word of this novel's publication started leaking, fans of Nesbo's best-selling series have been scratching puzzled heads: Harry alive? Well, you're not going to find the answer in this review, and in fact, you won't find it definitively until page 505 of Nesbo's maddening yet riveting cat-and-mouse game of a novel. But let's leave poor Harry in a kind of literary limbo for the moment and focus on what with or without Harry is one hell of a thriller. Police officers in Oslo are being murdered by a serial killer with a bizarre agenda: each victim is discovered at a crime scene that mimics the scene of an earlier unsolved murder. Not only that but the new victims all participated in the investigations of the earlier crimes. Is the killer a fellow cop? Working as an off-the-books task force, Harry's former colleagues Beate Lonn, Stale Aune, Bjorn Holm, and Katrine Bratt set out to find the answers. It's clear that Chief of Police Mikael Bellman and his henchman, Truls Berntsen, are dirty, but are they killers? Nesbo cunningly plays with the reader throughout this devilishly plotted tale, introducing multiple corkscrewing twists and, while we're worrying about Harry, slipping in a horrifying shocker from another direction altogether. The narrative is ingenious, but it grips us the way it does because, after nine novels, we've formed abiding relationships with these characters and don't like to see them messed with. Nesbo messes with everyone here, especially the reader, but furious as we'd like to be, in the end we're willing supplicants.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
STOP! PUT THAT book down! You may think it's time to catch up with Jo Nesbo, the Norwegian crime novelist everyone's talking about, and you're right. But POLICE (Knopf, $25.95) is no place to start. This densely plotted story, translated by Don Bartlett, is one of Nesbo's darkest and most disturbing, the tale of a serial killer with a taste for the macabre who observes the anniversary of each of his murders by luring a police detective to a gruesome death at the scene of the very crime the officer failed to solve. The chills are palpable in this nerve-racking thriller, but key narrative elements and several characters are straight out of Nesbo's previous novel, "Phantom," which begs to be read first. The author's most confounding plot device, however, is keeping the reader in the dark about the fate of his hero, Harry Hole, the maverick Oslo detective who took a bullet in "Phantom" and may be dead... or in a coma... or recovering in the arms of his beloved ... or hovering in spirit above the heads of the select group of police officers who are conducting their own clandestine investigation into the cop killings. Removing Harry from the action is a bold move that pays off in incisive character studies of the ensemble players who have always languished in his shadow - secondary figures like Beate Lonn, the brilliant head of forensics, and Stale Aune, the mild-mannered psychologist who misses the adrenaline rush of helping hunt down Harry's monstrous criminals. Nesbo has always had a soft spot for his madmen and their grotesque methods of murder. Although he has yet to surpass the fiend he brought to life in "The Snowman," the child rapist and murderer who slithers through this story comes pretty close. It's more surprising to see the care this hard-boiled writer has taken with less flashy characters like Anton Mittet, a humble policeman who has been assigned to guard a comatose hospital patient we assume to be Harry. Mittet grows in stature throughout the story, but he's been a moody guy from the start. Looking around the brand-new hospital building, he fantasizes about the future patients who would someday die there. "It was already in the air," he tells himself, "invisible bodies with restless souls had already been admitted." AS HISTORICAL MYSTERIES go, Victorian England has its charms; but dirty, pestilential 18th-century France really promises a walk on the wild side. Jean-François Parot delivers on that pledge with gusto in THE CHÂTELET APPRENTICE (Gallic Books, paper, $15.95), the first of 10 novels being translated by Michael Glencross and featuring Nicolas Le Floch, a young police inspector who's a keen student of forensic science yet isn't above some down-and-dirty street fighting. This is an age, after all, when the police routinely apply torture during interrogations and depend on "a host of informers, spies and prostitutes" to keep one step ahead of the criminals. Nicolas's first case, an investigation into the disappearance of a high-ranking police official, ushers this one-time country boy into the presence of Louis XV at Versailles. Being French, Nicolas tends to brood on existential matters ("The young man wondered about the enigma of the human character") while turning to philosophers like Pascal for guidance. But his is no high-society tale: he takes us into the dank cells of the Bastille, the reeking morgue of the Basse-Geôle, the boisterous brothels and taverns and stewpots and all the other places we really want to see. FINDING HERSELF IN a society governed by "flux and rearrangement," Precious Ramotswe, the intrepid proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Botswana, is determined to remain as steadfast as a constellation in the night sky. But Alexander McCall Smith's beloved sleuth comes to accept the inevitability of change in THE MINOR ADJUSTMENT BEAUTY SALON (Pantheon, $24.95) when her trusted "associate detective," Grace Makutsi, leaves the agency to have a baby. After being left to handle two cases on her own - verifying the identity of the heir to a farm and unmasking the person behind a hate campaign against the owner of a beauty salon - Mma Ramotswe realizes it's time to make some momentous concessions, even if her own philosophy on parenting goes no further than: "Give babies lots of love and keep them warm and don't let flies settle on their noses." AN ENGLISH village as pretty as Nether Monkslip needs a romantic local legend - and perhaps a tasteful murder - to entice readers who love a cozy mystery. G. M. Malliet arranges for both in PAGAN SPRING (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne, $24.99), which challenges the Rev. Max Tudor, the resident sleuth in this charming series, to identify a murderer among his parishioners and closest friends. Two cleverly designed set pieces, a meeting of the Writers' Square (the precious name chosen to avoid the clichéd Writers' Circle) and an elaborate dinner party, are a droll introduction to the villagers. Malliet is a gentle satirist, except when she's manhandling Thaddeus Bottle, an egocentric playwright and actor who heads everyone's list of potential murder candidates. Even Max gets a ribbing over his relationship with the woman who owns the New Age Goddesspell shop and practices an idiosyncratic brand of - wait for it - paganism.
Library Journal Review
The Oslo Crime Squad hunts for the serial killer responsible for the torture and murder of police officers staged at the scenes of earlier unsolved crimes. Nesbo's (The Redeemer; The Phantom) newest mystery presents an entire school of red herrings as readers try to discern who is the villain, who is the next victim, and what happened to Harry Hole. A stalker/student with a peripheral connection to an earlier case diverts attention from the investigation while obstruction by the politically connected chief of police and his vicious henchman hinders the detectives in their desperate chase to stop the murderer(s) before another colleague is harmed. VERDICT Followers of the Harry Hole (pronounced Hoola) series will want to read this book for both the resolution to the end of a previous novel, The Phantom, and the development of an old antagonist. Though Nesbo's police procedurals have become increasingly violent and heavy on coincidences, crime fiction readers will enjoy the high level of suspense that is sustained throughout as more questions are raised than answered before the startling conclusion is reached.-Deb West, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.