The son

I HAD THE WRONG IDEA about beach books. It came from "Goodbye, Columbus," where Neil Klugman tells Brenda Patimkin that his cousin Doris always has "War and Peace" by the pool: "That's how I know it's the summer, when Doris is reading 'War and Peace.'" Pool and beach being the same to me back then - an idiot kid forced to sit outside with no TV, uncomfortable with my shirt off as my grandfather paraded around to show off he still had a body - I didn't see that Philip Roth was mocking Doris, and so for years protected myself from the water and sand I resented and feared by lugging along a classic. This is how I read "Swann's Way" at the Mamaroneck Beach Club as a guest of Uncle Marty and Aunt Lee. It took many visits. Here I would like to thank them personally. But I was ahead of the curve, too. Beach books have gotten bigger, thicker and whompier, no longer such a disposable genre that we're expected to chuck them in the waves until the day the sea gives up its wretched books. Today, we accept that dark and cursed thrillers, even those suffused with the wintriest of premises, are not antithetical to lying on stolen hotel towels and bragging about where you were accepted to college but decided not to attend. Happily, this summer there are a couple of destined-to-be classics, somewhat fresher than "Buddenbrooks": Mo Hayder's "Wolf" and Jo Nesbo's "The Son." WOLF (Atlantic Monthly, $26) is Hayder's 10th book, her seventh to feature the remarkable Detective Inspector Jack Caffery and her fifth to include the enigmatic vagrant she calls the Walking Man. Hayder will write the occasional stand-alone novel but keeps doubling back to Caffery, not unlike the way Jack himself keeps returning to his life's defining event: the disappearance of his 9-year-old brother, Ewan, years earlier, into a pedophile ring. "He would now be mid-40s," Jack thinks. "Maybe he'd look the way Jack does now, maybe not. Somehow Jack thinks Ewan would be heavier - stockier and taller. He tries to imagine Ewan doing this in a similar mirror in a similar car somewhere and finds he can't." Over time, Jack has determined that the Walking Man's only activity is combing the Somerset countryside in expanding circles whose perimeter he marks with crocuses, their center the spot where the Walking Man's daughter was abducted years ago. "When he finds an immovable object in his way - a road, a house, a city - he assesses it. If it was there before his daughter went missing, he skirts it. If it was built afterward he does what he can to tear it away and check it hasn't been built over a grave. He doesn't care how often he breaks the law to achieve this." What links Jack to the Walking Man is that both are unable to bury their dead, or their pasts. But when the Walking Man allows Jack to discover his campsite, it is to seal a bargain: If Jack will find the owners of a stray dog with a note reading help us taped to its collar, the Walking Man will provide an important puzzle piece about his brother. Doing endless door-to-doors - "Do you recognize this dog?" - Jack becomes his own walking man, eventually chancing across a home invasion that might connect to the community's "Wolf murders" years earlier (when 60 feet of intestines were removed from teenagers trapped mid-sex, then used "to decorate the trees above the corpses in the shape of a heart"). "So I did some research," one home invader comments later, "and what I discovered is that some people are unnaturally attached to the sight and smell and feel of viscera. They love the slime and the blood." That same gentleman carries an antibacterial spritz everywhere in the huge house they've invaded, because "he could smell the accumulation of months and years of badly wiped surfaces." It should be clear this book gives good grizzle, but it can also be swiftly hilarious. We laugh because we bleed. Anyone who finds the story repugnant is too easily repugged. Hayder's work and characters are worth the unending nightmares they will inspire. Every bit as intricately disturbing is Jo Nesbo's THE SON (Knopf, $25.95), with its creepy, sinister, purgatorial cops and crooks in an extravagant universe you keep waiting to see light poking through. The characters pour forth in a Dickensian torrent. And as you'd expect from the Norwegian crime author of the moment - perhaps the crime author of the moment, period - Nesbo presents Oslo as a dwindling star that disappoints its Oslovians. The city reflects their private miseries. Of Chief Inspector Simon Kefas, the ostensibly moral center of this stand-alone novel (a break from the esteemed Harry Hole series), it is said that "he loved Oslo in the summer holidays ... when it returned to being the slightly overgrown village of his childhood where nothing much ever happened and anything that did happen meant something. A city he understood." Even the director of the local rehab center suffers from unthinkably Norwegian "compassion fatigue" - until she meets an escaped prisoner named Sonny, anyway, whose police officer father killed himself rather than stand exposed of corruption. That suicide initiates the great trail of confession that engulfs this novel, as the strangely pacific Sonny turns to drugs and starts confessing to crimes he didn't commit in exchange for money and heroin: "Yes, I killed her. Yes, I'll read up on how I did it." (This wry tone is one of the pleasures of the book, or at least of Charlotte Barslund's translation.) Eventually, though, Sonny learns something about his father that impels him to break out and exact revenge as "the Buddha with the Sword." Buddha because he had no enemies inside - prisoners used to confess their sins to him. There is no sword. There is Sonny and another man crossing a field hearing the "furious and increasingly loud barking" of caged Argentine mastiffs : "'They think they're about to be fed,' said Fidel, but didn't add: with you." (Eventually, an answer is posited to a question I've always wondered about: What if Jesus got away?) Simon used to be devoted to police work. He even explained once to his much younger wife, Else, how "a crime scene could be beautiful" - how, for instance, "the blood spatter formed a pattern that resembled a teardrop." Now, though, Else is going blind, and that consumes him: "Last night he had dreamed that he could give up his sight for her. And when he had woken up and not been able to see, he had - for a second before he realized that it was due to the eye mask he wore to block out the early-morning sun in summer - been a happy man." We like Simon more here than elsewhere. But even this moment of grace has an underside that echoes the detective's curse: Inevitably, you are almost too willing to un-see what you've seen, yet resentful of those who can't see what you've seen for them. In a novel of elaborate, shifting father-son relation- ships - real and assumed - Nesbo's most complicated characters seek redemption by spanning their private Vaterland Bridge between old and new Oslo, and their old and new selves. Thrillers are increasingly breaking loose from their genrefication, if that's a word (and if it isn't, it should be). This progress mirrors a similar trend in television, where for years now the quality of writing has matched - or vastly exceeded - that of theater and movies. Debased, once-derided genres rule. If F. Scott Fitzgerald were drinking himself to death in Hollywood today, he'd be doing it on the staff of "Justified." Or maybe he'd be writing a thriller. Laura Kasischke, the author of mind of winter (Harper, $24.99), is not only a suspense novelist, she's also a prizewinning poet. Then again, Raymond Chandler was a poet too. "Mind of Winter" is not precisely in the classic Chandler mold; it's closer to what used to be called a "chiller," and the police don't show up until the last page. Kasischke's title comes from the Wallace Stevens poem "The Snow Man," which appeared in his first book - an achievement that will elude Holly, a failed M.F.A. poet whose tiny grant stopped her in her tracks years ago. What she can do, however, is adopt a Russian child, Tatiana, and pour her missing poetry into her. The best sections of the book take place at the Siberian orphanage where, seeing the baby for the first time, Holly grabs her husband so hard she leaves bruises. It's a good ominous mom moment. The book is gutsy enough to acknowledge that adoption is not always a gift from the angels and that parents can be as selfish as anyone. When Holly pats her husband's place in bed beside her and thinks: "Please, God, let him be gone. Let him be gone so I can have a few minutes alone to write," she is so indiscreetly repellent it's hard to dislike her. It gets easier once Kasischke starts breaking down the boundaries between reality and illusion, and Holly starts spouting lines comparing Tatty's "sweet breath" to "fruit? Fruit that had softened under a warm lamp? " It brings to mind Ezra Pound's advice to T.S. Eliot: "Son, don't get too poet-y." Well, that's what he meant to say, anyway. Coincidentally, Kasischke's novel and Hesh Kestin's the lie (Scribner, $24) both turn on the same bombshell. Kasischke's takes half of a short book to come into focus, but Kestin's, with all respect, is obvious from pretty much the first page. (My advice on bombshells: Unless they're in "She's my sister and my daughter!" country, steer clear.) The central character of "The Lie" is Dahlia, a left-wing attorney advising the Israeli police on how far they can go, legally, when torturing suspects. Their logic in asking her is clear: If she says stop, it's because she's soft; if she gives the green light, who can argue? Ho, that one really deserved a good torture! But why on earth would Dahlia take such a job, you are already asking. It's a good question, but the narrative is less concerned with that than with what will turn Dahlia. Because something will. Luckily Kestin, a Brooklyn-raised former foreign correspondent, engages us with authentic detail. Special squads of Orthodox Jews carefully comb the area after a terrorist bombing, seeking "bits of brain, an ear, the odd finger, lest these pieces go unburied." A squadron of Palestinian gliders prepares to approach Israel from a Lebanese cliff. The phones in the police headquarters are all pink - doubtless because someone's brother-in-law had a crate to unload: I can get your antiterrorism for you wholesale! It may help to be pro-Israel to embrace this book fully. Perhaps some time spent with Matt Rees's four moving mysteries about the inherited sadness and joy of the Palestinian Omar Yussuf will provide a useful counterbalance. Even so, Kestin's image of Beirut families in apartment buildings gathered around shimmering big-screen TV's - "the Westernized equivalent of the Bedouin fire pit" - will stay with you. Television's been popping up in crime novels for years. But it was always background noise, a prop: the yakkety burbling through seedy motel walls or punks flicking channels to see if the flatfoots were on to them. But there's a specificity to the TV references in this batch of novels, which if it isn't meaningful - well, maybe it's not meaningful. But it feels noteworthy that even as we get big screens in Beirut, there's a guy in Oslo selling Sonny the Buddha a burner phone while thinking: "God Almighty. A drug dealer who said sorry and who had never seen 'The Wire.'" Or creeps on the subway who harass Sonny in their "MTV Norwegian." Israelis in "The Lie" who call their flying-bomb drones "Killer Smurfs." And in David Ignatius' the director (Norton, $26.95), a new C.I.A. director who struggles to explain his job to his sons: "This job is like 'Homeland,' for real. I can't tell you about it." Ignatius, a foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, has written impressive spy novels for 25 years - eight of them in all, including "Agents of Innocence" and (my favorite) "A Firing Offense," a newsroom book about ajournalist enmeshed with the C.I.A. that rang especially true because Ignatius is a journalist. He has probably never been a hacker, which may explain why "The Director" - about the possibility that the C.I.A.'s computers have been breached - feels more researched than lived, and vaguely cobbled together with materials from his previous, better, book, "Bloodmoney." The C.I.A. director himself, Graham Weber, is a good guy but a half-putz. His early decision to put the agency's Internet operations into the hands of a hacker called the Pownzor ("It means, 'I own you.'... You 'pown' someone when you take down his system") - well, that's dumb. Hackers hack. When we catch up to the Pownzor strutting around the grounds at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and the code breaking lads powned the Nazi's Enigma machine, we know something bad's brewing. Here and there, amid occasional hints that hackers are messianic sexual deviants, it's worth remembering that their culture originally started as a way to copy software the hackers couldn't afford. In college, I was invited to a dorm room to behold four blind kids making international calls for free just by whistling tones into a phone. It was thrilling. I wish this book had delighted me that way, but I'll still read anything Ignatius writes. Even Graham Greene didn't get it right every time. Matthew Quirk had a fratty wiseguy best seller in "The 500," and now brings its hero, Mike Ford, into a sequel, the directive (Little, Brown, $26). Quirk's been watching the wrong stuff on TV - the hyped-up "24," which always feels like a vicious parody of entertainment agents in Los Angeles: speeding around in cars screaming into cellphones while thinking you're saving the world through deal points. Mike and his brother, Jack, learned how to be con men from their dad. Mike works at a hotshot Washington consulting firm in "The 500," and in a good moment, his satanic boss gets Mike's dad sprung from Allenwood, where he's doing a 24-year bid, so that's the setup: Bad dad you love, good dad you hate. "The Directive" forces Mike to join his treacherous brother (the best character in the series) to rob this thing called "the directive" from the Federal Reserve. Not the gold there - that's the plot of one of the "Die Hard" movies - but a single number that lets traders manipulate the markets and pivot the global economy and release the Black Sox from the Phantom Zone. It's all M.B.A. fantasyland to me. Quirk is at his best writing about Mike's family psychology: "As we approached the Fed, Jack looked at me. He always projected a galling confidence, the certainty that no matter how far he went, or what he did wrong, he'd make it through unscathed. But in that moment, after all these years, it had disappeared. I'm ashamed at how satisfying it felt for me to watch it go." If any theme unites all these books, it's that we're all on the run from our fathers and our families, though if we run long enough and far enough we can meet them coming toward us. CHARLIE RUBIN is a television writer and producer. He teaches at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

As a teenager, Sonny Lofthus learns of his father's death-the circumstances of which disgrace his family and catapult Sonny into despair. To cope with his loss, Sonny seeks escape through heroin and at age 18 admits to crimes he did not commit. As payment for his confession, corrupt Oslo prison staff, lawyers, and a priest supply Sonny with a steady stream of heroin. Then, 12 years later, the same faction threatens to cut off Sonny's heroin supply unless he confesses to a murder. At the same time, a fellow inmate provides Sonny with new information about his father's death. Sonny breaks out of prison to make the people responsible pay for their treachery. While Oslo police search for Sonny, he untangles a web of corruption throughout the city. VERDICT The best-selling author of the Harry Hole series (Redeemer; Nemesis) delivers an exceptional, gritty, fast-paced stand-alone thriller; the smooth transitions among each character's perspectives lure readers in, and Barslund's translation is accessible to American readers. Fans of the most recent Hole novels as well as of Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" trilogy will enjoy Nesbo's tightly knit plot.-Russell Michalak, Goldey-Beacom Coll. Lib., Wilmington, DE (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

1 Rover kept his eyes on the white-painted concrete floor in the eleven-square-metre prison cell. He bit down on the slightly too long gold front tooth in his lower jaw. He had reached the hardest part of his confession. The only sound in the cell was his nails scratching the madonna tattoo on his forearm. The boy sitting cross-legged on the bed opposite him had remained silent ever since Rover had entered. He had merely nodded and smiled his blissful Buddha smile, his gaze fixed at a point on Rover's forehead. People called the boy Sonny and said that he had killed two people as a teenager, that his father had been a corrupt police officer and that Sonny had healing hands. It was hard to see if the boy was listening--his green eyes and most of his face were hidden behind his long, matted hair--but that didn't matter. Rover just wanted his sins forgiven and to receive Sonny's distinctive blessing so that tomorrow he could walk out of Staten Maximum Security Prison with the feeling of being a truly cleansed man. Not that Rover was religious, but it could do no harm when he intended to change, to give going straight a real try. Rover took a deep breath. "I think she was from Belarus. Minsk is in Belarus, isn't it?" Rover looked up quickly, but the boy made no reply. "Nestor had nicknamed her Minsk," Rover said. "He told me to shoot her." The obvious advantage of confessing to someone whose brain was fried was that no name and incident would stick; it was like talking to yourself. This might explain why inmates at Staten preferred this guy to the chaplain or the psychologist. "Nestor kept her and eight other girls in a cage down in Enerhaugen. East Europeans and Asians. Young. Teenagers. At least I hope they were as old as that. But Minsk was older. Stronger. She escaped. Got as far as Tøyen Park before Nestor's dog caught her. One of those Argentine mastiffs--know what I'm talking about?" The boy's eyes never moved, but he raised his hand. Found his beard. He started to comb it slowly with his fingers. The sleeve of his filthy, oversized shirt slipped down and revealed scabs and needle marks. Rover went on. "Bloody big albino dogs. Kills anything its owner points at. And quite a lot he doesn't. Banned in Norway, 'course. A guy out in Rælengen got some from the Czech Republic, breeds them and registers them as white boxers. Me and Nestor went there to buy one when it was a pup. It cost more than fifty grand in cash. The puppy was so cute you wouldn't ever think it . . ." Rover stopped. He knew he was only talking about the dog to put off the inevitable. "Anyway . . ." Anyway. Rover looked at the tattoo on his other forearm. A cathedral with two spires. One for each sentence he had served, neither of which had anything to do with today's confession. He used to supply guns to a biker gang and modify some of them in his workshop. He was good at it. Too good. So good that he couldn't remain below the radar forever and he was caught. And so good that, while serving his first sentence, Nestor had taken him under his wing. Nestor had made sure he owned him so that from then on only Nestor would get his hands on the best guns, rather than the biker gang or any other rivals. He had paid him more for a few months' work than Rover could ever hope to earn in a lifetime in his workshop fixing motorbikes. But Nestor had demanded a lot in return. Too much. "She was lying in the bushes, blood everywhere. She just lay there, dead still, staring up at us. The dog had taken a chunk out of her face--you could see straight to the teeth." Rover grimaced. Get to the point. "Nestor said it was time to teach them a lesson, show the other girls what would happen to them. And that Minsk was worthless to him now anyway, given the state of her face . . ." Rover swallowed. "So he told me to do it. Finish her off. That's how I'd prove my loyalty, you see. I had an old Ruger MK II pistol that I'd done some work on. And I was going to do it. I really was. That wasn't the problem . . ." Rover felt his throat tighten. He had thought about it so often, gone over those seconds during that night in Tøyen Park, seeing the girl over and over again. Nestor and himself taking the leading roles with the others as silent witnesses. Even the dog had been silent. He had thought about it perhaps a hundred times. A thousand? And yet it wasn't until now, when he said the words out loud for the first time, that he realised that it hadn't been a dream, that it really had happened. Or rather it was as if his body hadn't accepted it until now. That was why his stomach was churning. Rover breathed deeply through his nose to quell the nausea. "But I couldn't do it. Even though I knew she was gonna die. They had the dog at the ready and I was thinking that me, I'd have preferred a bullet. But it was as if the trigger was locked in position. I just couldn't pull it." The young man seemed to be nodding faintly. Either in response to what Rover was telling him or to music only he could hear. "Nestor said we didn't have all day, we were in a public park after all. So he took out a small, curved knife from a leg holster, stepped forward, grabbed her by the hair, pulled her up and just seemed to swing the knife in front of her throat. As if gutting a fish. Blood spurted out three, four times, then she was empty. But d'you know what I remember most of all? The dog. How it started howling at the sight of all that blood." Rover leaned forward in the chair with his elbows on his knees. He covered his ears with his hands and rocked back and forth. "And I did nothing. I just stood there, looking on. I did fuck all. While they wrapped her in a blanket and carried her to the car, I just watched. We drove her to the woods, to Østmarksetra. Lifted her out and rolled her down the slope towards Ulsrudsvannet. Lots of people take their dogs for walks there so she was found the next day. The point was, Nestor wanted her to be found, d'you get me? He wanted pictures in the papers of what had happened to her. So he could show them to the other girls." Rover removed his hands from his ears. "I stopped sleeping; every time I closed my eyes I had nightmares. The girl with the missing cheek smiled at me and bared all her teeth. So I went to see Nestor and told him I wanted out. Said I'd had enough of filing down Uzis and Glocks, that I wanted to go back to fixing motorbikes. Live a quiet life, not worry about the cops the whole time. Nestor said that was OK, he'd probably sussed that I didn't have it in me to be a tough guy. But he made it very clear what would happen to me if I talked. I thought we were sorted. I turned down every job I was offered even though I still had some decent Uzis lying around. But I kept thinking that something was brewing. That I would be bumped off. So I was almost relieved when the cops came and I got put away. I thought I'd be safer in prison. They got me on an old case--I was only an accessory, but they had arrested two guys who both said that I had supplied them with weapons. I confessed to it on the spot." Rover laughed hard. He started to cough. He leaned back in his chair. "In eighteen hours I'm getting out of this place. Haven't got a clue what's waiting for me on the outside. But I know that Nestor knows I'm coming out even though I'm being released four weeks early. He knows everything that goes on in here and with the police, I'm sure of it. He has eyes and ears everywhere. So what I'm thinking is, if he wanted me dead, he might as well have me killed in here rather than wait for me to get out. What do you think?" Rover waited. Silence. The boy didn't look as if he thought anything at all. "Whatever happens," Rover said, "a little blessing can't hurt, can it?" It was as if a light came on in Sonny's eyes at the word "blessing" and he raised his right hand to signal that Rover should come closer and kneel. Rover knelt on the prayer rug in front of the bed. Franck didn't let any of the other inmates have rugs on the floor in their cells--it was a part of the Swiss model they used at Staten: no superfluous items in the cells. The number of personal possessions was limited to twenty. If you wanted a pair of shoes, you would have to give up two pairs of underpants or two books. Rover looked up at Sonny's face. The boy moistened his dry, scaly lips with the tip of his tongue. His voice was surprisingly light even though the words came slowly, but his diction was perfectly clear. "All earthly and heavenly gods have mercy on you and forgive your sins. You will die, but the soul of the penitent sinner shall be led to Paradise. Amen." Rover bowed his head. He felt the boy's hand on his shaved head. Sonny was left-handed, but in this case it didn't take a genius to work out that he had a shorter life expectancy than most right-handed people. The overdose could happen tomorrow or in ten years--who knew? But Rover didn't think for one minute that the boy's hand was healing like people said. Nor did he really believe this business with the blessing. So why was he here? Well, religion was like fire insurance; you never really thought you'd need it, so when people said that the boy was prepared to take your sins upon himself and didn't want anything in return, why not say yes to some peace of mind? What Rover did wonder was how someone like Sonny could have killed in cold blood. It made no sense to him. Perhaps it was like the old saying: The devil has many disguises. "Salaam alaikum," the voice said, and the hand was lifted. Rover stayed where he was with his head lowered. Probed the smooth backside of the gold tooth with his tongue. Was he ready now? Ready to meet his Maker if that was his fate? He raised his head. "I know you never ask for anything in return, but . . ." He looked at the boy's bare foot which he had tucked under. He saw the needle marks in the big vein on the instep. "I did my last stretch in Botsen and getting hold of drugs in there was easy, no problem. Botsen isn't a maximum security prison, though. They say Franck has made it impossible to smuggle anything into Staten, but"--Rover stuck his hand in his pocket--"that's not quite true." He pulled something out. It was the size of a mobile phone, a gold-plated object shaped like a pistol. Rover pressed the trigger. A small flame shot out of the muzzle. "Seen one of these before? Yeah, I bet you have. The officers who searched me when I came here certainly had. They told me they were selling smuggled cigarettes on the cheap if I was interested. So they let me keep the lighter. I don't suppose they'd read my rap sheet. No one bothers doing their job properly these days--makes you wonder how anything in this country ever gets done." Rover weighed the lighter in his hand. "Eight years ago I made two of these. I ain't boasting if I tell you that nobody in Norway could have done a better job. I'd been contacted by a middleman who told me his client wanted a gun he would never have to hide, a gun that didn't look like a gun. So I came up with this. It's funny how people's minds work. At first they think it's a gun, obviously. But once you've shown them that you can use it as a lighter, they forget all about it being a gun. They still think it could also be a toothbrush or a screwdriver. But not a gun, no way. So . . ." Rover turned a screw on the underside of the handle. "It takes two 9mm bullets. I call it the Happy Couple Killer." He aimed the barrel at the young man. "One for you, sweetheart . . ." Then he pointed it at his own temple. "And one for me . . ." Rover's laughter sounded strangely lonely in the small cell. "Anyway. I was only supposed to make one; the client didn't want anyone else to know the secret behind my little invention. But I made another one. And I took it with me for protection, in case Nestor decided to try to kill me while I was inside. But as I'm getting out tomorrow and I won't need it any more, it's yours now. And here . . ." Rover pulled out a packet of cigarettes from his other pocket. "Because it'll look weird if you have a lighter, but no cigarettes, right?" He then took out a yellowed business card saying "Rover's Motorcycle Workshop" and slipped it into the cigarette packet. "Here's my address in case you ever have a motorbike that needs fixing. Or want to get yourself one hell of an Uzi. Like I said, I still have some lying--" The door opened outwards and a voice thundered: "Get out, Rover!" Rover turned round. The trousers of the prison officer in the doorway were sagging due to the large bunch of keys that dangled from his belt, although this was partly obscured by his belly, which spilled over the lining like rising dough. "His Holiness has a visitor. A close relative, you could say." He guffawed with laughter and turned to the man behind him. "No offence, eh, Per?" Rover slipped the gun and the cigarette packet under the duvet on the boy's bed and took one last look at him. Then he left quickly. The prison chaplain attempted a smile while he automatically straightened his ill-fitting dog collar. A close relative. No offence. He felt like spitting into the prison officer's fat, grinning face, but instead he nodded to the inmate emerging from the cell and pretended to recognise him. Glanced at the tattoos on his forearms. The madonna and a cathedral. But no, over the years the faces and the tattoos had become too numerous for him to distinguish between them. The chaplain entered. He could smell incense. Or something that reminded him of incense. Like drugs being cooked. "Hello, Sonny." The young man on the bed didn't look up, but he nodded slowly. Per Vollan took it to mean that his presence had been registered, acknowledged. Approved. He sat down on the chair and experienced a slight discomfort when he felt the warmth from the previous occupant. He placed the Bible he had brought with him on the bed next to the boy. Excerpted from The Son by Jo Nesbø All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.