Jo Nesbo: Phantom review

Harry Hole is back and he's on fine form! After the disappointment of Headhunters, my faith in Nesbo is fully restored by an excellent book, the seventh in the Oslo series.

Harry returns to Norway after three years, drawn by the news that Rakel's son, Oleg, is in serious trouble. Things haven't gone well for Oleg since Rakel kicked Harry out - he's a junkie, in love with a junkie, arrested for shooting another junkie. Can Hole find the real murderer?

Jo Nesbo: Nemesis Review

Nemesis tells the tale of the hunt for a bank robber, a super-efficient robber who nevertheless cold-bloodedly kills when apparently he doesn't need to.

Harry Hole is a member of the team investigating the robbery, as is a young Beata Lønn (who goes on to feature strongly as a forensics expert in later novels). The two are asked by senior police to form an unofficial investigation team as a rigid Inspector Iversson leads the main team nowhere.

Jo Nesbo: The Devil's Star Review

Detective Harry Hole is after another serial killer in something of a change of style for Nesbo. Less of the explicit violence and gore, more psychological movings, more Hitchcock than Grand Guignol.

Someone is abducting young women from the daylit streets of Oslo. Bodies are found, characterised by a chopped-off finger and a blood red diamond secreted on the corpse. The case is given to Harry's arch rival, the man he suspects of being a smuggler and a murderer, Inspector Tom Waaler. The two are due a showdown ...

Jo Nesbo: The Leopard Review

Another romping tale of bloody murder in Norway, another serial killer on the loose and Harry Hole is the man to catch him. Oslo police aren't sure how he's killing his female victims; Hole has to be brought back from the hideaway he ran to after a near nervous breakdown following his heroics in The Snowman.

Jo Nesbo: The Redeemer Reviewed

Another very good novel from Nesbo, really hitting his stride after some early hiccoughs. A Croatian serial killer is on the loose in Norway, Detective Harry Hole is hunting him, or justice, or either.

Jo Nesbo: The Snowman Reviewed

Nesbo's best work yet; you can see why his US publisher went big with this book, it's a cracking tale of serial killing and snowmen. Policeman Harry Hole is dragged around Norway as the body count mounts - someone with a talented scalpel is killing women and taunting the police by building snowmen at the scenes of the crimes.

Detective Harry is awash in a sea of TV stars, doctors, good cops and bad cops, office politics and Nesbo's usual red herrings. Jo Nesbo hasn't always been as subtle in the use of such devices as I'd have liked; here he's mastered the art to provide a series of plausible but blind alleys and crescendos of action.

Jo Nesbo: The Redbreast Reviewed

Nesbo's detective Harry Hole appears in a tale of decades old revenge and murder, interspersed with a look at Norway's WWII fascists and their present day counterparts.

The novel starts unpromisingly for Hole: alcoholic tremors in a police car as he watches his section of the visiting US President's route, an unknown intruder in a building, a desperate footrace hoping for a stay, a shot ...

Jo Nesbo Reviewed

Let's settle one thing quickly: The next Stieg Larsson? No! Lazy journalism from hacks who couldn't find Norway on a map.

Both write crime fiction: one writes police procedurals, the other writes from the point of view of a journalist and a grossly-abused near-autistic hacker. They do have snow in common but that's not much of a determinant of style or content.