Blood on Snow

Blood on Snow (2014)
by Jo Nesbo

Jo Nesbo is fabulous. He writes dark, edgy crime novels set in Norway. His books are always fast-paced, adrenaline-fuelled adventures (like every good crime novel should be) but he also elevates the crime novel to another level - he writes very clever crime novels. Most of Jo Nesbo's books feature alcoholic detective Harry Hole, the ultimate flawed hero and my absolute favourite protagonist of any crime series. There are ten Harry Hole novels in total (although the first two were only translated into English recently), the most recent being 2013's Police, a best-selling and critically-acclaimed triumph of a novel. Whether there will be more novels in the series is yet to be confirmed, but in the meantime Jo Nesbo has been happily churning out a number of short and sharp stand-alone novels like the absolutely brilliant Headhunters (from 2011), The Son (from 2014) and most recently, Blood on Snow.

The Harry Hole series - if you have not already read these books, you should probably do so immediately.

Set in Oslo shortly before Christmas of 1977, Blood on Snow is a very short, pacey novel about Olav, a hitman with a heart. When we first meet Olav, he's just shot someone and is calmly considering the visual effect of the blood dripping onto the snow and pondering the science of snow crystal formation. As Olav tells his victim, his death was nothing personal. Olav works for gang boss Daniel Hoffman. Upon reporting back to Hoffman, Olav is given his next assignment - to kill Hoffman's wife for a hugely exorbitant fee. Concerned that this may mean he's about to be terminated, Olav begins to freak out a bit. A series of misadventures follows as Olav's life begins to unravel rather quickly.

Not entirely relevant, but the Sex Pistols were also in Oslo in 1977.

Much like Harry Hole, Olav is not the kind of character you'd expect to find in this type of book. Self-deprecating with a sharp sense of humour, Olav explains that he's a fairly useless criminal (unsuitable for jobs as a getaway driver, robber, pimp or drug dealer), with "fixing" the only thing he's manage to develop a knack for. Despite his dyslexia, Olav is a voracious reader with wide-ranging tastes, including Viking sagas, nature books, poetry and Les Miserables. He's also a bit of a poet himself and is extremely dedicated to stalking the love of his life, an ex-prostitute. Olav has a unique perspective on the world and the people around him, describing a crime boss as "a jovial, fat man with a walrus moustache who made you think of Santa Claus, until it suited him to slash you with a Stanley knife" and waxing lyrical about the more observation aspects of his job: "You can't see a person more nakedly than that, when they don't know they're being watched".
Even in a book this short, Jo Nesbo doesn't really do one-dimensional protagonists.

Not only is Olav complex and unique, he's also a little unreliable - he has a tendency to gloss over details that later turn out to have been extremely important and it's never quite certain that he's being completely honest with the reader. This is particularly true in the case of his beloved - is she an ex-girlfriend? A current girlfriend? A stranger who Olav is creepily stalking? It's a little hard to tell, which keeps the narration particularly interesting.

At 200-ish pages, with a plot that hurtles along at breakneck speed, Blood on Snow is easily a read-in-one-sitting book. It's quirky and interesting and so much fun to read; Blood on Snow is a beautifully constructed, absolutely engrossing little roller-coaster-ride of a book. Read it - I promise that you won't be disappointed.

9/10