The Leopard
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.
Moreover - would you believe it - he gets tangled up with the triads. Nesbo's out of his depth in Hong Kong, but like so many other crime writers, could not resist giving our cinematic city a cameo.
A colleague of Hole's is dispatched to find the old soak, bring him back to Norway, and to the business of catching the nation's serial killers: another one is on the loose. Hole ticks all the world-weary-sleuth boxes. He's melancholic and moody. He's as intuitive as he is principled. He has a problem with authority, but only other people's. He's got that drinking problem. And he's unlucky in love, but still something of a chick magnet.
However, in Nesbo's hands, Hole's a tolerable - even engaging - cliche.
The only connection between the many victims of the latest killer is that they all spent the same night at some spooky remote hostel in Ustaoset, deep in Norway's mountainous interior.
Nesbo makes excellent use of snow and generally inclement weather to dramatise and control the tonality of this gripping narrative. And he effortlessly outpaces the reader's ability to guess what's going to happen next.
Inherited familial conflict is a major theme here. The novelist actually knows much of this condition, as his father fought for the Germans during the Nazi occupation of Norway, while his mother took up arms with the resistance. This tormented duality evidently provided their son with remarkable psychological insights. And he employs them well in his fiction. The Leopard is a cracking read. Just cut Nesbo some slack during the mercifully brief Hong Kong segment.