The Leopard

Jo Nesbo

Vintage, 688 pages

There is something in the cold Scandinvaian air that makes the region an incubator for an amazing group of crime fiction novelists who arm themselves with pens, pistols and poison to create gripping and suspenseful fiction.

Stieg Larsson may be the most popular name in the genre but Jo Nesbo is coming on strong. He may just be the grittiest of this band of authors who use the starkness, desolation and frigid cold of the region to their advantage, creating brutal, harsh and dramatic noir tinged with black comedy.

In The Leopard Nesbo unsurprisingly features murder and mayhem on the mean streets of Oslo. Nesbo’s antihero, Detective Harry Hole returns to face his personal demons and solve another gruesome case.

Things begin violently in Oslo, where we meet Detective Kaja Solness who is working on a grizzly case where two murdered women are discovered drowned in their own blood. Obviously there are few clues and lots of unanswered questions and very little hope of a breakthrough.

The dead  women have puncture wounds inside their mouths that Oslo's finest are at a loss to explain. But what they do have is a mean machine specialist with experience in capturing and tracking serial brutal killers, Harry Hole. There is one small problem though, Hole is a mess.

Hiding out in Hong King, Hole is broken hearted and still bares the battlescars from his last case. He also is on the lamb from a band of unpleasant credit agents.  The detective wants nothing else but to vanish from the outside world.

Despite his best efforts to vanish, Hole is found by Solness and recruited for the unsolved case. Once on board Hole returns to Oslo and finds danger lurking around every corner. As a strange series of clues unfolds the intensity builds to a  vilent crescendo Hole face a ruthless psychopath while also confronting the personal demons that continue to haunt him.

The Leopard is a tightly woven work of modern crime fiction with well developed characters and a gripping plot that is not unbelievable. Although Nesbo never shows all of is cards to the reader he does
reveal just enough to entice them to keep turning  the pages. Thus the bloody coldness and edgy ferociousness of this novel make it impossible to put away.