When Jo Nesbø’s Police showed up at my apartment a while back, I groaned in disappointment. Another Norwegian crime thriller? Good lord. Soon as I finish one, it’s all I can do to get even a moment to myself before another one lands on my desk.
And so, reluctantly I picked up the substantially sized international best seller (weighs in at over 500 pages) and gave it a shot.
The truth (aside from the fact that I did read it) is this: I honestly had never heard of Jo Nesbø or the principal character from this series (the grizzled detective, Harry Hole). In fact, I was under the impression that Jo was a woman (as it happens, quite definitely a man) and felt nervous about a book translated from Norwegian. Would there be nuanced bits of conversation that would be left out? How confusing would the various names and places in Oslo be?
Turns out, the fact that I was probably mispronouncing all of the character’s names in my head (how would you say, “Ståle Aune”? I went with Stah-lay Oww-n) and had little awareness of street and location names, my enjoyment of the book wasn’t altered much, if at all.
Now, I’m not much of a connoisseur of thrillers but in thinking of how I wanted to write this review, I came to the conclusion that it would be best to leave it bare on the side of specifics. Of course, it’s not giving away much to say there’s a killer on the loose (this time, it’s a cop killer with a motive) and the Oslo Crime Squad is on the case.
Outside of that, I feel like you need to discover for yourself. I will warn you, there are a lot of characters. At first, it was a tad overwhelming (especially with how unfamiliar their names are) but once I got rolling with the story, I actually found it fun to keep track of everything. In fact, it was precisely that overwhelm of information that kept me reading the book so consistently. Not only did I want to find out what happened next (like most great thriller writers, Nesbø clearly has the art of the page turner down pat), but I also didn’t want to let too much time lapse because I might forget where we were in the investigation.
Yes, I said we. By the time I got to the end of the book, I really felt like I had some stake in what was going to happen. Would they catch the killer? How many main characters were going to make it out alive? Would the Chief of Police get embroiled in the scandal? There were so many questions, and I wanted so many answers.
And, unlike the show Lost, Police actually provided those answers. It’s one thing to take a reader/viewer on a long, winding road with tons of plot twists, characters and storylines… but you’ve got to pay it off at the end.
With over 500 pages of room to play, Nesbø does that in spades.
