by Jo Nesbo
740 pages, Vantage Books
Review by Marc Nash
At the end of Nesbo's previous novel,
"The Snowman", my satisfying first encounter with this highly touted
crime writer (see earlier Booksquawk review), the publishers give the first
chapter of his next, which turned out to be this book. And very fine a first
chapter it was too, as a woman wakes up into a terrifying situation. Her fear
and the strangeness of her disposition are really well ramped up by Nesbo and
explode in a terrifying conclusion to the chapter.
But then "The Leopard" never
really gets any better than that imaginative first chapter. With the action
spread out between Nesbo's Norway, Hong Kong and The Congo, this book had the
feel of being written in hotel rooms as a superstar author conducts a world
tour. The parts in the Congo, amidst its perpetual internecine wars, just
didn't ring particularly true, its colonial past only sketchily rendered. And
Hong Kong, where detective hero Harry Hole begins this story, also seems exotic
for the sake of being exotic, rather than the reader being able to gain any
true taste of the place. Hole has, ahem, holed up there and developed a heroin
addiction in the aftermath of the Snowman case and the fracturing of his
relationship with his partner and her son. He is persuaded, somewhat
unconvincingly to this reader's mind, to come back to Norway to tackle another
serial killer. Oh and to visit his terminally ill father. The heroin addiction
recedes from centrality for most of the rest of the book. Hole muses
unconvincingly on patrimony, family and death after hospital visits, in between
trying to solve the case which doesn't really overlap with any of these themes,
other than death of course.
And if Hole is able to overcome heroin
easily enough, some of the death-defying manoeuvres he is able to negotiate are
equally incredulous. He survives avalanches, being kidnapped by gun-happy
Congolese militia and tedious attempts at political backstabbing by other
Norwegian security officials. The plotting is also somewhat leaden, in that
each time a suspect crops up on the horizon, the reader is confident that this
is a red herring being offered up just through how it is structured. Though the
killer's identity is successfully masked by Nesbo, throwing the reader off the
trail, I really wasn't that interested by the book's culmination. And just to lay
it on even thicker with a trowel, Nesbo resorts to that most recent of
post-Hannibal Lecter clichés, having Hole visit The Snowman killer in prison in
order to pick his brain on his fellow serial killer's modus operandi, like all
serial killers are members of the same club and have to abide by its code of
practise.
So, I have read two Nesbo books now, the
last two in the Harry Hole series. One I loved and this, the other, was an
absolute trial to get through. So I guess I'm going to have to read a deciding
third title to see if I am going to continue with the man and read all his
oeuvre or not. I'll get back to you when I have.
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