Taking another break from the ongoing adventures of detective Harry Hole (last seen in the surprisingly happy ending of 2013’s Police), Norwegian crime fiction master Jo Nesbø shifts perspective from the good guys to the bad in a new single-sitting thriller.
With his history of concocting deep villains, it’s no surprise that Nesbø can write convincingly through the eyes of a hired killer, the otherwise inept Olav Johansen, a “fixer” for a crime boss who deals in prostitution and heroin in 1970s Oslo.
Roughly a third the length of his typical novels, Blood on Snow moves at a quicker pace as well, with Nesbø’s writing crisper and shorter on the whole. By taking the first-person perspective, he’s able to push right into Olav’s head, the detached ruthlessness of his outward character bumping against an internal world of uncertainty, doubts and quirks.
The novel, published in Norway under the pseudonym of Tom Johansen with at least a second volume to follow, opens in the dark Oslo winter, its coldest in decades. After shooting a man, Olav watches the man’s blood mingling with the wind-swept snow: “The snow sucked the blood up as it fell, drawing it in under the surface, hiding it, as if it had some sort of use for it.”
Such a casual, almost poetic observation from a man well versed in the faces of death suggests a divide, either subconscious or intentional, on Olav’s part, a need for stronger inward defenses against his murderous exterior. Olav’s reaction to the latest job in his four years as a fixer carries through to the next scene, a conversation with crime boss Hoffman. The job—at five times the normal rate—is to kill Hoffman’s own wife.
Olav hesitates, but knows he can’t back out. Too many of Hoffman’s secrets are bared to the fixer already and from the moment of the job offer, no matter who might carry out the act, Olav now knows Hoffman would be the one responsible for his wife’s death.
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