The Leopard
by Jo Nesbo
Harvill Secker
With grim inevitability, publisher Harvill Secker has stuck the epithet, 'The Next Stieg Larsson' (quoting a British daily), on the cover of Jo Nesbo's sure-hit best-seller. Nesbo hails from Sweden's neighbour, Norway, and writes crime fiction. 'Next Stieg Larssons' are now threatening to outnumber Ikea stores worldwide.
In any event, thanks to Eva Gabrielsson's memoir Stieg & Me we now have a clearer picture of the Scandinavian novelist every publisher wants to find the next-one-of. Is Nesbo a fit? He's a strikingly cool merchant of mystery, yet nothing like you-know-who, especially in his writing style; Nesbo's pacing is more Hollywood than Sodermalm.
After stints as a taxi driver, rock singer, freelance journalist, and stockbroker, the 51-year-old Nesbo turned to writing full-time several years ago, and the first Detective Harry Hole mystery, The Redbreast, gained solid reviews and sold briskly on publication in 2007. The series has since shifted million of units.
This is the sixth book in the snowbound franchise. The story starts with something that seems to happen to all fictive detectives at least once: the hard-drinking Hole, of the Oslo Crime Squad, has gone absent without leave.
He's still traumatised by the case that almost killed him in The Leopard's predecessor, the multimillion-selling The Snowman, and is recuperating in Hong Kong, where he develops an addiction to betting at Happy Valley. And also - utterly improbably - to opium.