Jo Nesbo is one sick puppy. This is not something I’ve just discovered; reading all of his Harry Hole novels has made that abundantly clear to me, and each new volume just pushes the boundaries a little farther. His most recent Harry Hole book, Killing Moon, takes his dark imagination to new and more horrible places.
I love it.
You might have thought, at the end of the last book, Knife, that Harry Hole, formerly of the Oslo Police Department, had finally broken free of his involvement with police affairs and serial killers and the like, and at the beginning of Killing Moon, Harry is in Los Angeles, California, attempting to drink himself to death (which is very much in character for him). His death wish doesn’t keep him from getting involved with other people, though, including Lucille, an older woman, once an actress and now a person who owes money to some very relentless people. It’s his friendship with Lucille, and his need to get her out of trouble, that leads him back into the world of serial killers and the police department that shaped much of his life.
The first quirk is that Harry isn’t employed by the police, and officially he’s not supposed to be involved in the case at all. He’s been hired by Markus Roed, a wealthy man who’s an obvious suspect in the murders of two young women who had both been at the man’s party shortly before their deaths. Roed swears he’s innocent and is willing to pay a lot to have Harry prove someone else is the murderer. Harry needs the money, so he’s willing to work for Roed, a man for whom he has nothing but contempt, but he’s not committed to proving Roed innocent if the man is the actual murderer.
We sort of know who the murderer is, because he’s one of the point of view characters in the book. However, we know him by his nickname of Prim, and as the plot progresses, there are several people who could be Prim, and that’s part of the suspense, especially when we near the climax and are following three different people, all of whom are in positions where they might be the killer and we have to guess which is the right one (and such is Nesbo’s skill that, even though I know he does this all the time, I still couldn’t pick the right person for the killer).
The stomach-turning aspect of the book isn’t the way the killer dispatches his victims (though that’s gruesome enough). It’s how he sets his victims up in the first place, and what he does to himself to lure his victims. If you know something about toxoplasmosis, you’ll guess the method of the luring (and Nesbo helpfully shows us two instances of mice approaching cats which will then kill them), but this is not for the squeamish (which I always say about Nesbo, with ample reason).
There are twists and turns in the plot, times when you think you know where the story is going only to realize you’ve been tricked. As with all the Harry Hole books, there’s a point, about three quarters of the way through, when the plot gets supercharged and you simply cannot stop reading until you get to the end, no matter what else might be going on in your life.
If you’re a fan, you’ll want to read this one. It’s prime Harry Hole, and there’s even a possibility, however slight, that he might ride off into the sunset and start a life as a more or less normal person. I wouldn’t bet on it, though, and even though this was one gruesome book, I can hardly wait to see if there’s going to be another one.