At the Goethe-Institut, 5750 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles 90036. Ample free street parking, as well as parking under the building. Ticket, $25.
Jo Nesbo takes the word “thriller” very seriously. His books are indeed thrillers, in every sense of the word. They are really police procedurals of the most unpredictable sort, and they prompt the reader to continually wonder how can a writer climb inside the head of a psychopath so effortlessly. Nesbo goes farther than just about any other cop writer—he gives us not only the mind of the baddest of bad guys, but colors in the scene around the crime so fully. Who thinks about the poor sods who find the victims—and the circumstances behind their being in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or how the petty squables among the cops might not really benefit the investigation? And we watch—helplessly—while the bad guys take down Oslo. As in all great cop fiction, the real story is what drives the main investigator. And Henry Hole, perhaps the most fascinating and most troubled cop besides Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, is only pages away to rescue us, and Oslo, from killers and brutally intelligent psychopaths.
Jo Nesbo’s villains and his good guys are wildly thrilling characters, to be sure. But so is Nesbo. He’s an actual rock star in Norway—he sings and writes songs for one of the biggest rock groups in the country. He dabbles as an economist. He’s been a stockbroker and a professional soccer player, but his day job as a terrific novelist is one he should keep: his books sell millions of copies in Europe and here in the United States, and have been translated into forty languages.
In Nesbo’s new book, Police, the victims that keep turning up dead are police, whose bodies are found at the scene of the crimes which they once investigated. Where’s Harry Hole? Why can’t he climb out of his coma and figure out what monster is behind the cop killings? Nesbo increases his suspense page by page as he sets up the victims, and the hapless innocents who happen to discover their bodies. The cops are desperate for an answer, Oslo is losing one cop after another, and we the readers are a happy bunch.
Nancie Clare knows cop fiction. She is, after all, the editor of Noir Magazine, a new tablet publication for devotees of the genre. Noir covers all crime genres—true crime, mystery, thriller—and includes reviews and commentary on fiction, television and film.
If you haven’t met Jo Nesbo yet, and if you love truly terrific, heartstopping cop literature, we urge you to discover him and his literature.