Author: Jo Nesbo
Enjoyment Rating: ***
Source: Kindle for iPad
Books I've read this year: 70
I'm not sure how many books into the Harry Hole series we are now, but it's at least half a dozen. At the beginning of The Leopard, Harry has left Norway and is living in Hong Kong, where he has traded alcohol addiction for opium addiction, and he's doing his best to let the drug help him forget Rakel and Oleg, with whom he narrowly escaped from the Snowman's murderous clutches and who now need some space.
As the book opens, Kaja Solness, a detective with the Oslo Police Force, arrives in Hong Kong to bring Harry home. At least two women have turned up dead, and the police force thinks it has another serial killer on its hands. Hole reluctantly returns and steps into the middle of a turf war between the local force and a crime squad, so he has to tread carefully. The murders are gruesome, and there are so many people who could have committed the crime.
I really admire Nesbo's use of symbolism and analogy-- he's another author who always does a great job of presenting an image, and then reintroducing it in a way that's essential to the plot several hundred pages later. He's a rewarding author to read because he makes a reader feel smart. Many of the Amazon reviews mentioned that the Hole books seem more and more sensational all the time, and this definitely feels like the hardest, most violent of the Hole novels. I wonder if, in some ways, it's because Harry himself is becoming harder and harder as the weight of his job threatens to pull him under.
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