Reply To: Books I've Read

[Desert_Fox]

Up

0

Down

::

The Snowman (Harry Hole #7) by Jo Nesbø

In February of this year I read The Devil’s Star, a Harry Hole novel by Jo Nesbo. I then said I would wait a month or so to start another Hole novel as I needed a break. Well it was a bit more than a month and it was a bit of “or so”. But I was ready.

Michael Fassbender is a pretty good actor and he portrayed Harry in the movie version of this book. It was a good movie but it doesn’t hold much of a candle to the book. That’s not unusual. Books typically are better than the movie made from them. You can put so much more detail in a book and for me, I can use my imagination to fill in parts that the movie shows me whether my imagination would be better or not. With Jo Nesbo you have wonderful prose but still ample opportunity for your imagination to work, and this novel gave my imagination quite a work out.

Nesbo leads us down a wandering road, a road filled with misdirection and steps that didn’t lead where you thought they were taking you.

Someone is killing women, women that the killer sees as whores. And they’ve been doing it for a very long time, years. And not just women but men; a disgraced but a detective good at his job of detecting and a doctor. The whys of that are known somewhat early on for the latter but not until the end of the book for the former.

And Harry’s apartment is being torn up in an attempt to eliminate mold and fungus.

Rakel is Harry’s ex, but each has a problem leaving bygones as bygones. Plus there’s Oleg, Rakel’s son who see’s Harry as a father figure. Throw in Katrine, a much different character in the book than the novel.

This book was complicated, intricate. It showed us Harry at his best as a detective and it also showed us Harry as sober. We have seen Harry sober before but not through an entire novel.

This book is a treat for Hole fans (remember, it’s pronounced ‘holy’.) It gives us Harry at his best and it gives us the characters that Nesbo people’s his stories with colorful characters full of life and death. If you like Nesbo, if you are a fan of Harry Hole you will like this book as much as any of the preceding ones. It’s a humdinger.

". . . those who claim to know the Mind of God, who will tell you what God thinks and how He will judge and condemn others—those people are the greatest of all blasphemers." Aloysius Xingu Leng Pendergast