A random purchase at an op shop got me back into this Norwegian crime series starring Harry Hole, the grizzled, hard-drinking, rule book-shredding, classic rock-loving detective with uncanny instincts for solving the most puzzling and heinous crimes.
It’s been years since I last opened a Harry Hole novel, however I wasn’t at all shocked to discover that life hasn’t been kind to our rogue detective in the meantime. This latest 13th entry opens in Los Angeles, where Harry is holed up in a cheap den with an intent of drinking himself to death. I read this series out of order so Harry’s personal life to me has always been a weird disconnected patchwork, but I was still saddened to find out that Rakel, Harry’s wife and the love of his life, has now been brutally murdered by someone close to him. What could ever make Harry go back to his native Norway and the city full of painful memories?
An unexpected friendship with an elderly woman called Lucille, a former actress, does the trick. It appears that his new LA friend owes loan sharks from Mexico a million dollars or so, and they will kill Lucille unless Harry pays the ransom in exactly ten days. He has no choice but to take up an offer from a wealthy Oslo businessman Markus Røed, suspected of murdering two young women, who wants to hire Harry as a private investigator so that he can clear his name. As if one ticking clock wasn’t enough, the killer’s stomach-turning methods raise fears that a deranged serial killer is running loose in Oslo, and could strike again.
Back home, Harry must also face his own past, and various former colleagues who are not all pleased with Harry working for Røed rather than helping the police investigation. He assembles his own ragtag team of mostly disreputable individuals including a corrupt cop, a reformed drug dealer, and a forensic psychologist who is now terminally ill and whose cancer ward is the place for daily meetings. During lighter moments, they also indulge in some nerdy banter about music and bands, an endearing staple of Harry Hole novels I remembered well. Overall Nesbo does a good job catching up a returning reader like myself on Harry’s recent past, in fact you’d be perfectly safe going into this novel completely cold.
As usual, Nesbo tells the story through the perspectives of multiple characters – including the creepy killer known only by his nickname, Prim. Prim’s personal history turns out to be as hair-raising and gruesome as his crimes, which is not to say that it inspires a drop of sympathy. At this point, I forgot most of the plot from the older Harry Hole novels, but I can still remember being impressed by the sheer macabre, inventive nastiness that at times made them verge on horror. Killing Moon continues the tradition of mining the darkest, most depraved and gruesome corners of a human mind. Let’s just say that the byline on the cover, the killer will get inside your head, is not a metaphor.
I was half-expecting to complain about the novel’s hefty page count (nearly 500), but to my relief it never felt bloated or overindulgent, or lost its urgency as it built towards the knuckle-biting climax taking place during a summer lunar eclipse. Along the way, there are plenty of blind alleys, false endings, and misleading clues (and a bizarre masked trip into the underworld of the elite that had major Eyes Wide Shut vibes).
Harry himself makes about as many wrong conclusions as the reader. Though he always felt a bit of a hard-boiled cliché to me, I do enjoy his detective style. His independent mind is never swayed by other people’s easy solutions. Ideas tend to hover on the edge of his consciousness, just outside his reach, until the moment it all snaps into focus.
I wouldn’t say that Killing Moon is my new favourite Harry Hole novel, but it’s definitely rekindled my interest in the series entries I have missed out on. Though Nesbo’s prose remains functional rather than sublime, it still has that Nordic Noir cool that first attracted me to his books years ago. He also makes some interesting observations about the recent social and economic changes in Norway as seen through the eyes of his varied characters (he’s obviously not a huge fan of Oslo’s new Munch Museum, which I have to agree looks pretty hideous).
yggdrasille.com 