Book Review

By Derryll White

Nesbo, Jo (2022).  Killing Moon.

“You saved my life, you fool.”    – Lucille

Jo Nesbo breaks all the rules here, and it is delightful.  Harry Hole, now separated from the Oslo police force, sets up his own independent investigation.  Going against an efficient and well-funded police machine, Hole gathers to him a cab driver/drug dealer, dying psychologist and shoddy, bent cop – and calls them the Aune group.  Of course this opens the framework of a police procedural to become anything – a social commentary, political diatribe or appealing standard novel.  There are definite advantages to breaking the rules.

The author has a knack for including things that resonate with the reader.  Keith Richards’ formula for staying alive jousts with Nesbo’s formula for identifying gays, all in the cold depths of Oslo.  This is storytelling that keeps the reader alert.

‘Killing Moon’ is a long novel (the hardback is 489 pages) and Jo Nesbo keeps the reader with him the whole way, enthralled by the many side issues, political comments and over-the-top science.  Best of all, Nesbo makes the reader feel, constantly.  Whether it is a little boy’s delicate love or the anguish of a friend’s suicide, the author shepherds the reader through a dark forest of Norwegian feelings.  Jo Nesbo has a winner here!

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Excerpts from the novel:

LOS ANGELES – It served as a reminder that Los Angeles wasn’t a city built on movie successes but on a garbage heap of human and financial failure.  Over eighty per cent of the films made bombed completely and lost money; the city had the highest homeless population in the U.S.A. living at a density comparable to Mumbai’s.  Traffic congestion was in the process of choking the life out of the city, though street crime, drugs and violence might get there first.

SHIFTING MORALITY – No, the problem was the two girls from the party.  One had been found dead, and the other was still missing.  And both of them could be connected to Markus.  Their Sugar daddy.  The words had even appeared in print.  The idiot – she could have ripped his head off!  She wasn’t Hillary Clinton and this wasn’t the nineties, she couldn’t just “forgive” her husband.  Because these days women weren’t allowed to let the bastards get away with that sort of thing.  As long as he was discreet and didn’t make her a laughing stock, it was all right.

NATURAL – “Your mother should have treated him better, he was her patron, after all.  Just like the parasite that is humanity should treat this planet better.  Well, no reason to be sorry about that either.  People think we biologists wish to preserve nature unchanged, like an organic museum.  But we seem to be the only ones who understand and accept that nature is in flux, that everything dies and disappears, that is what’s natural.  Not the continued existence of the species, but its destruction.”

NORWAY – It would be one person’s word against another’s and the only person who could confirm that any so-called sexual abuse had occurred had perished in a fire.  But even an allegation would damage his reputation if it came out.  Stain the façade, as the people in this country so contemptuously put it.  Because Norway was a country where concepts like family honor had been eroded by social bloody democracy, because the state was the family for most people now, and the small individuals had nobody to answer to but their equals, social democracy’s grey mass, so lacking in tradition.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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