– 75% of the people who are basing their argumentation on statistics have just made it up. –

I just finished Police (in reality it was the German version of it is called Koma), the latest and 10th episode of the Harry-Hole-books series by Jo Nesbø. When reading a new episode of a series like this I try not to read the back-cover summary. It happened that this short text spoiled big parts of the main story of a book or gave clues which destroyed whole threads of the entire story.

So I did here – I avoided the blurb and Nesbø was able to fool me for quite some pages. Great!

The story is as good as previous Hole-books and full of surprises. His way of describing the environment, the behavior and the actions of the characters creating great images. It binds you to the book – it’s gripping. IMHO with every new book Nesbø is getting better and better in doing this.

But the most important for me: The intensive and staccato-like concatenation of paragraphs and chapters starring the main (and most desired) characters is something I rarely get in books I’m reading. This is where Nesbø is doing an outstanding job – not only in this work: He does not fear overloading the reader with sequencing all actions done by one single character in back-to-back stacked sections. I even have the feeling that sometimes the spaces he puts between them are just there to have the reader get some breath, sleep and to not have him missing the station where he has to get off of the train.

The characters and the dialogs and actions are appropriate and consequent compared to previous books. Having said that, I was unable to find any average person in the book. Everyone seems to have at least one extreme behavior-problem. Which is, of course, always (ab)used by someone to do her bad. Like these kind of problems are written on one’s forehead.

I would not recommend this book to someone who hasn’t read Phantom. Well, maybe one should even read The Leopard before, too. If you read this book first and you like it, it will spoil important plots of previous stories and it would a pity. The joy of the Hole-stories will be partially gone.

So, Mr. Nesbø, now it’s time: I’d like to see Harry Hole moving on a screen! Sadly, I only know the Hole created in my mind. I would like to get to know another one’s creation; one way to meet such a new interpretation of a fictional person is to have someone make a movie or theatre-piece of it. Go for it.