Knife

Review by New York Times Review

DOES ANYONE write creepier villains than Jo Nesbo? Wait a minute, I'm thinking. Still thinking. O.K., the answer is: No, I can't think of anyone who makes my skin crawl like Nesbo. In KNIFE (Knopf, 4SI pp., $27.95), translated from the Norwegian by Ned Smith, a sexual predator named Svein Finne is at large in Oslo. "Finne's driving force is to spread his seed and father children," we learn. "It's his way of gaining eternal life." If he fails to impregnate his victims, he casually kills them. If any of the women should have an abortion, he punishes them in vile ways. And if any of them should bring a child to term, "the Fiance," as he's known, appears in the delivery room to "assist" in the birth. While Finne's intervention at the hospital is disturbing, it provides this weirdo with an ironclad alibi for the killings being investigated by Harry Hole, the rogue police detective in Nesbo's bleak noir series. Harry is at a low point in his unstable life. He's drinking much of the time - to the point of sucking up the last drop of whiskey from a filthy floor - and when his wife leaves him, this time for good, he completely falls apart. But this is what readers expect of Harry, whose weaknesses somehow contribute to his manly appeal. And whenever he does fall flat, there always seems to be a good woman around to pick him up. "He was unshaven, his eyes were bloodshot and he had a liver-colored scar running across one side of his face," according to one such woman, upon meeting him for the first time. "But even if his face had something of the same brutality as Svein Finne, there was something that softened it, something that made it almost handsome." In an unexpected move, Nesbo resolves the business of the psycho flaneé rather early in the story, which necessitates the introduction of another slippery killer, as well as a chilling flashback to a military mission in Afghanistan. There's an explicit description of that reliable old method of execution, "drawing and quartering," if that's your thing, plus many other throwaway delights, including a list of the eight categories of killers, of which No. 8 is "just plain bad and angry." They play great music in Ace Atkins's down-home mystery, THE SHAMELESS (Putnam, 446 pp., $27). Fine country tunes like Waylon Jennings's "Rainy Day Woman" ("Woke up this mornin' to the sunshine / It sure as hell looks just like rain"). They also throw superior shindigs, like the annual Good Ole Boy, "a big gathering of every swindler, huckster and elected official in north Mississippi." They're just a little sloppy about observing the laws of the land. A long time ago, the sheriff of Tibbehah County, Miss., ruled Brandon Taylor's death a suicide; but 20 years later, two Brooklynites hope to prove otherwise on their true-crime podcast. The two reporters are bland white bread compared with the hell-raising locals they encounter down South - folks like Old Man Skinner, who thinks it's a fine idea to build a 60-foot cross on the highway, and Fannie Hathcock, whose brothel sign would be hidden by the cross. There's a plot in here somewhere, but it doesn't intrude on the real fun, like catching up with the boys in the barbershop watching "Days of Our Lives." If you think of cozy mysteries as palate cleansers, the body in the WAKE (Morrow/HarperCollins, 219 pp., $25.95) is your kind of book. Katherine Hall Page's latest Faith Fairchild mystery (the 25 th in a long-running series) sends her beloved amateur sleuth on a rare solo vacation to the family's summer cottage in Maine. Her minister husband, Tom, is fine, as are their two grown children, so series fans need not worry. Faith, a professional caterer, plans to relax and help a bit in the kitchen of a friend whose daughter is getting married. (There's a recipe for old-fashioned blueberry buckle at the back of the book that seems easy to make and sounds delicious - except you really need wild Maine blueberries, which are hellish to gather.) Given her sleuthing history, it's not surprising that Faith's detective skills are called on when a body with goth tattoos is found floating in the lily pond. Murder, if murder it is, is a grave business, but the next-door neighbors are committing a more serious crime by cutting down the old-growth pines on their property, which had provided much-needed privacy. In the country, some people would happily fight to the death over such an offense. The question is: Will Faith find the villain in time to save the wedding? DAVID GORDON'S sequel to "The Bouncer," THE HARD STUFF (Mysterious Press, 311 pp., $26), opens with Joe Brody in a car with three strangers, on their way to New Jersey to kill a man. On most work nights, Joe can be found arming the door at a Mafiaowned strip joint, the Club Rendezvous, "talking down drunks, extracting gropers and defusing fights." But when he was in the military, Joe specialized in killing people, and he's managed to hang onto that skill set, which occasionally comes in handy. Like now, when a coalition of mob bosses makes him their unofficial "sheriff" and directs him to make some shady heroin suppliers disappear. For no good reason except the fun of it, that assignment somehow necessitates pulling off a complicated diamond heist. Gordon's quirky characters and offbeat humor take the sting out of some action scenes of horrific violence. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Who is the darkest of them all?" If there was a crime-fiction magic mirror somewhere, and one were to put this query to it, hoping to determine whose novels were the darkest in mood, in theme, and in the protagonist's soul, the answer, almost certainly, would be Jo Nesbø. No one knows darkness like Nesbø's Harry Hole, the Oslo supercop who continually confronts demons both in the external world and every bit as terrifying in his own mind and heart. So it is here, in Nesbø's latest Hole adventure. The inner demons take the first bite, sending Harry tumbling off the wagon yet again and prompting his wife, the long-suffering Rakel, to throw him out. But that's only the beginning. There's a new serial killer in town, but Harry, confined to cold cases, isn't free to track him or to make the case that this killer isn't new at all. Harry's bête noire, Svein Finne, is out of jail (where Harry put him 10 years ago), and, in Harry's mind at least, is on the rampage once more. Yes, but bouts with booze and serial killers are old hat for Harry. So Nesbø delivers a haymaker to Harry's solar plexus that leaves him reeling as he's never reeled before. Want to know more? No, you really don't, at least not now. Focus instead on Harry doing what he does when the darkness descends: finding killers with the kind of intuitive and analytical mind you wouldn't think would still work after all that Jim Beam. But work it does in what may be Nesbø's best storytelling yet. It's not just clever; it's diabolical, and let's be glad it is, because the corkscrewing plot provides a measure of relief from the pain on view in this uncompromisingly intense and brilliant novel.--Bill Ott Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Library Journal Review

In the 12th installment of this best-selling series (after The Thirst), Harry Hole's life has sunk to a new low. Assigned to work cold cases for the Oslo police, he's unable to investigate longtime adversary Svein Finne, recently released from prison. Additionally, since separating from his wife, Rakel, he's started drinking heavily again, so he's not too shocked when he wakes up covered in blood with no recollection of the evening before. When he's called about a murder that literally hits close to home, his world is utterly shattered. Harry is forbidden from officially investigating the case, but naturally he finds a way to follow leads and question suspects with the help of his friends. As evidence increasingly points to him, his despair and hopelessness send him into a downward spiral from which he might not emerge. VERDICT Dark, gritty, and clever, this is quintessential NesbØ, a powerhouse of a storyteller. Familiarity with the characters is beneficial, but not required, to appreciate this well-plotted mystery. Series fans will either love or hate this, but either way it's a must-read. [See Prepub Alert, 1/14/19.]--Anitra Gates, Erie Cty. P.L., PA

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Inspector Harry Hole's 12th case is his most grueling to date. And considering his history on and off the Oslo Police (The Thirst, 2017, etc.), that's quite a claim.Back on the bottle since his wife, human rights executive Rakel Fauke, threw him out, Harry wakes up one morning with no idea how he's spent the last two days. Even before he can sober up, he's hit by a tornado: Rakel has been murdered, and Harry's colleagues want him to stay out of the case, first because he's the victim's husband, then because they can't rule him out as her killer. The preliminary evidence points to Svein Finne, whose long career of raping women and later stabbing them to death unless he's gotten them pregnant, hasn't been slowed down just because he's spent 20 years in prison and is now pushing 80. The elusive Finne, the very first killer Harry ever arrested, is driven by the need to avenge his own son's death: "For each son I lose, I shall bring f-five more into the world." Captured after Harry unforgivably uses his latest rape victim as bait, Finne blandly confesses to Rakel's murder, but the unshakable alibi he produces sends the inquiry back to square one. A series of painstaking investigations identifies first one plausible suspect, then another, each one of whom might have been designed specifically to immerse Harry more deeply in his grief. And even after each of these suspects, beginning with Finne, is cleared of complicity in Rakel's death, they continue to hover malignantly over the landscape, ready to swoop down and wreak still further havoc. Long before the final curtain, most readers will have joined Harry, shut out of the official investigation and marginalized in ever more harrowing ways, in abandoning all hope that he can either close the case or enjoy a moment of peace again.The darkest hour yet for a detective who pleads, "The only thing I can do is investigate murders. And drink"and a remarkable example of how to grow a franchise over the hero's most vociferous objections. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 A ragged dress was hanging from one branch of a rotting pine tree. It put the old man in mind of a song from his youth, about a dress on a washing line. But this dress wasn't hanging in a southerly breeze like in the song, but in the ice-cold meltwater in a river. It was com­pletely still down at the bottom of the river, and even though it was five o'clock in the afternoon, and it was March, and the sky above the surface of the water was clear, just as the forecast had said, there wasn't a lot of sunlight left after it had been filtered through a layer of ice and four metres of water. Which meant that the pine tree and dress lay in weird, greenish semi-darkness. It was a summer dress, he had concluded, blue with white polka dots. Maybe the dress had once been coloured, he didn't know. It probably depended on how long the dress had been hanging there, snagged on the branch. And now the dress was hanging in a current that never stopped, washing it, strok­ing it when the river was running slowly, tugging and pulling at it when the river was in full flow, slowly but surely tearing it to pieces. If you looked at it that way, the old man thought, the dress was a bit like him. That dress had once meant something to someone, a girl or woman, to the eyes of another man, or a child's arms. But now, just like him, it was lost, discarded, without any purpose, trapped, constrained, voiceless. It was just a matter of time before the current tore away the last remnants of what it had once been. "What are you watching?" he heard a voice say from behind the chair he was sitting in. Ignoring the pain in his muscles, he turned his head and looked up. And saw that it was a new customer. The old man was more forgetful than before, but he never forgot the face of someone who had visited Simensen Hunting & Fishing. This cus­tomer wasn't after guns or ammunition. With a bit of practice you could tell from the look in their eyes which ones were herbivores, the look you saw in that portion of humanity who had lost the kill­ing instinct, the portion who didn't share the secret shared by the other group: that there's nothing that makes a man feel more alive than putting a bullet in a large, warm-blooded mammal. The old man guessed the customer was after one of the hooks or fishing rods that were hanging on the racks above and below the large television screen on the wall in front of them, or possibly one of the wildlife cameras on the other side of the shop. "He's looking at the Haglebu River." It was Alf who replied. The old man's son-in-law had come over to them. He stood rocking on his heels with his hands in the deep pockets of the long leather gilet he always wore at work. "We installed an underwater camera there last year with the camera manufacturers. So now we have a twenty-four-hour live stream from just above the salmon ladder round the falls at Norafossen, so we can get a more accurate idea of when the fish start heading upstream." "Which is when?" "A few in April and May, but the big rush doesn't start until June. The trout start to spawn before the salmon." The customer smiled at the old man. "You're pretty early, then? Or have you seen any fish?" The old man opened his mouth. He had the words in his mind, he hadn't forgotten them. But nothing came out. He closed his mouth again. "Aphasia," Alf said. "What?" "A stroke, he can't talk. Are you after fishing tackle?" "A wildlife camera," the customer said. "So you're a hunter?" "A hunter? No, not at all. I found some droppings outside my cabin up in Sørkedalen that don't look like anything I've seen before, so I took some pictures and put them on Facebook, asking what it was. Got a response from people up in the mountains straight away. Bear. A bear! In the forest just twenty minutes' drive and a three-and-a-half-hour walk from where we are now, right in the cen­tre of the capital of Norway." "That's fantastic." "Depends what you mean by 'fantastic.' Like I said, I've got a cabin there. I take my family there. I want someone to shoot it." "I'm a hunter, so I understand exactly what you mean. But you know, even in Norway, where you don't have to go back very far to a time when we had a lot of bears, there have been hardly any fatal bear attacks in the past couple of hundred years." Eleven, the old man thought. Eleven people since 1800. The last one in 1906. He may have lost the power of speech and movement, but he still had his memory. His mind was still OK. Mostly, anyway. Sometimes he got a bit muddled, and noticed his son-in-law exchange a glance with his daughter Mette, and realised he'd got something wrong. When they first took over the shop he had set up and run for fifty years he had been very useful. But now, since the last stroke, he just sat there. Not that that was so terrible. No, since Olivia died he didn't have many expectations of the rest of his life. Being close to his family was enough, getting a warm meal every day, sitting in his chair in the shop watching a television screen, an endless programme with no sound, where things moved at the same pace as him, where the most dramatic thing that could happen was the first spawning fish making their way up the river. "On the other hand, that doesn't mean it couldn't happen again." The old man heard Alf's voice. He had gone over to the shelves of wildlife cameras with the customer. "No matter how much it might look like a teddy bear, all carnivores kill. So yes, you should definitely get a camera so you can figure out if it's settled down somewhere near your cabin or if it was just passing through. And now's the time brown bears emerge from hibernation, and they're starving . Set up a camera where you found the droppings, or somewhere close to the cabin." "So the camera's inside that little bird box?" "The bird box, as you call it, protects the camera from the ele­ments and any animals that get too close. This one's a simple, reason­ably priced camera. It's got a Fresnel lens that registers the infrared radiation from the heat animals, humans and everything else give off. When the level deviates from the norm, the camera automati­cally starts to record." The old man was half listening to the conversation, but some­thing else had caught his attention. Something that was happening on the television screen. He couldn't see what it was, but the green darkness had taken on a lighter shimmer. "Recordings are stored on a memory card inside the camera--you can play it back on your PC afterwards." "Now that's fantastic." "Yes, but you do have to physically go and check the camera to see if it's recorded anything. If you go for this slightly more expensive model, you'll get a text message every time it's recorded anything. Or there's this one, the most advanced model, which still has a mem­ory card but will also send any recordings directly to your phone or email. You can sit inside your cabin and only have to go back to the camera to change the battery every so often." "What if the bear comes at night?" "The camera has black-light LEDs as well as white. Invisible light that means the animal doesn't get frightened off." Light. The old man could see it now. A beam of light coming from upriver, off to the right. It pushed through the green water, found the dress, and for a chilling moment it made him think of a girl coming back to life at last and dancing with joy. "That's proper science fiction, that is!" The old man opened his mouth when he saw a spaceship come into the picture. It was lit up from within and was hovering a metre and a half off the riverbed. The current knocked it against a large rock, and, almost in slow motion, it spun round until the light from the front of it swept across the riverbed and for a moment blinded the old man when it hit the camera lens. Then the hovering space­ship was caught by the thick branches of the pine tree and stopped moving. The old man felt his heart thudding in his chest. It was a car. The interior light was on, and he could see that the inside was full of water, almost up to the roof. There was someone in there. Some­one half sitting, half standing on the driver's seat as he desperately pressed his head up to the roof, obviously trying to get air. One of the rotten branches holding the car snapped and drifted off in the current. "You don't get the same clarity and focus as daylight, and it's black and white. But as long as there's no condensation on the lens or any­thing in the way, you should certainly be able to see your bear." The old man stamped on the floor in an attempt to attract Alf's attention. The man in the car looked like he was taking a deep breath before ducking under again. His short, bristly hair was swaying, and his cheeks were puffed out. He hit both hands against the side win­dow facing the camera, but the water inside the car leached the force from the blows. The old man had put his hands on the armrests and was trying to get up from his chair, but his muscles wouldn't do what he told them to. He noticed that the middle finger on one of the man's hands was a greyish colour. The man stopped banging and butted the glass with his head. It looked like he was giving up. Another branch snapped and the current tugged and strained to pull the car free, but the pine wasn't ready to let go just yet. The old man stared at the anguished face pressed against the inside of the car win­dow. Bulging blue eyes. A scar in a liver-coloured arc from one cor­ner of his mouth up towards his ear. The old man had managed to get out of his chair and took two unsteady steps towards the shelves of cameras. "Excuse me," Alf said quietly to the customer. "What is it, Dad?" The old man gesticulated at the screen behind him. "Really?" Alf said dubiously, and hurried past the old man towards the screen. "Fish?" The old man shook his head and turned back to the screen. The car. It was gone. And everything looked the same as before. The riv­erbed, the dead pine tree, the dress, the green light through the ice. As if nothing had happened. The old man stamped the floor again and pointed at the screen. "Easy now, Dad," Alf said, giving him a friendly pat on the shoul­der. "It is very early for spawning, you know." He went back to the customer and the wildlife cameras. The old man looked at the two men standing with their backs to him, and felt despair and rage wash over him. How was he going to explain what he had just seen? His doctor had told him that when a stroke hits both the front and back parts of the left side of the brain, it wasn't only your speech that was lost, but often the ability to commu­nicate in general, even by writing or through gestures. He tottered back to the chair and sat down again. Looked at the river, which just went on flowing. Imperturbable. Undeterred. Unchanging. And after a couple of minutes he felt his heart start to beat more calmly again. Who knows, maybe it hadn't actually happened after all? Maybe it had just been a glimpse of the next step towards the absolute dark­ness of old age. Or, in this case, its colourful world of hallucinations. He looked at the dress. For a moment, when he had thought it was lit up by car headlights, it had seemed to him as if Olivia was dancing in it. And behind the windshield, inside the illuminated car, he had glimpsed a face he had seen before. A face he remembered. And the only faces he still remembered were the ones he saw here, in the shop. And he had seen that man in here on two occasions. Those blue eyes, that liver-coloured scar. On both occasions he had bought a wildlife camera. The police had been in asking about him fairly recently. The old man could have told them he was a tall man. And that he had that look in his eyes. The look that said he knew the secret. The look that said he wasn't a herbivore. Excerpted from Knife: A Harry Hole Novel 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.

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