Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Good for a nightmare or three-a taut, fast-paced thriller with wrenching twists and turns.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. But will good prevail? It’s anything but a foregone conclusion.

Nesbø’s formula includes plenty of participation by Kaja, a very capable woman, and plenty of current geopolitical backdrop, making Nesbø a worthy mysterian-cum-social-critic in the Stieg Larsson tradition. It is vintage Nesbø to throw in red herrings and MacGuffins, but also to have Hole engage in a little John Woo–style dance, cop and suspect, in which the bad guy has a definite chance of taking out the good one. Several needles penetrated the rear part of the palate and reached the brain.” Yuck. Only Hole, it seems, can divine the mind of someone sick enough to pull off such a thing, and once Hole, plagued by the memories of earlier murders and a constant craving for drink and smoke, is pulled into the case early on in the novel, it’s all a go-go-go rush across the continents: Europe, of course, and Asia, but also Africa, where an ugly war is raging off in some backwater of the Congo and where, it develops, a person of interest is conducting a nasty trade. Naturally, something very ugly has happened back home a murder bloody enough to make a Viking of yore lose his lunch has occurred, involving a cruel instrument of torture that shoots out metal spikes: “Two needles pierced the windpipe and one the right eye, one the left. Enter Kaja Solness, Oslo gumshoe extraordinaire, who needs to find him immediately. (When the film is made, only the Stellan Skarsgård of Insomnia will do.) As Nesbø’s newest procedural opens, Hole has taken himself into a Hong Kong exile, where he ponders the smog that builds up thicker and thicker from mainland China and fills his own modest room with the smoke from his opium water pipe.

If there were a dictionary-definition image for numbed world-weariness, Oslo detective Harry Hole would be it, in just the way that Edvard Munch’s The Scream is the canonical image of terror. Another spooky gothic by Norwegian gloomster Nesbø ( The Snowman, 2011, etc.), the poet laureate of boreal psychopathy.

The leopard nesbo