Review by New York Times Review
THE FINNMARK PLATEAU is known as a beautiful spot. "Isn't that just the sort of thing people say about inhospitable places?" reflects the antihero of MIDNIGHT SUN (Knopf, $23.95), Jo Nesbo's character study of a fugitive Norwegian hit man. Jon Hansen has fled Oslo for this desolate land above the Arctic Circle, trying to escape the wrath of his boss, a mobster known as the Fisherman. Working as his debt collector and fixer was an easy job - until Hansen botched a murder and found himself in the Fisherman's cross hairs. Although it follows too closely the plot of a previous book, "Blood on Snow," this forcefully written story of personal defeat, despair and salvation, translated by Neil Smith, sends a man off to lose himself in the wilderness - where he finds himself instead. Introspective and sensitive, Hansen is the polar opposite of Harry Hole, Nesbo's far more commanding series detective. After moving into a cabin in the woods with no plumbing or electricity, Hansen settles down to brood about his worthless life. ("I'm just a pathetic, weak fool.") But a few days of that is enough to make him more receptive to the locals. The most interesting are Mattis, a keen-witted Laplander who persuades him to attend a strangely pagan wedding where he drinks fermented reindeer milk, and a 10-year-old named Knut, who introduces him to his mother, Lea, an abused wife (and soon-to-be widow). Lea and Knut are members of a harsh religious sect that promises an afterlife of fire and brimstone for sinners like Hansen. "It's only a stone's throw from the drumming of a shaman and witchcraft to the Laestadians' speaking in tongues," Mattis observes. But to a man desperate for redemption (and a hard-boiled author in need of a rest), this forbidding land, with its peculiar customs, proves irresistibly seductive. DONNA LEON'S VENETIAN mysteries never disappoint, calling up the romantic sights and sounds of La Serenissima even as they acquaint us with the practical matters that concern the city's residents. In THE WATERS OF ETERNAL YOUTH (Atlantic Monthly, $26), Venetians are troubled by an aggressive new wave of African immigrants, the latest street hustles aimed at tourists and the "pharaonically expensive" engineering project meant to keep the lagoon from flooding. Commissario Guido Brunetti and his colleagues are also afraid Italy might be losing its edge: The younger officers aren't nearly as willing as the older generation to bend the rules for a good cause. "Soon it'll be like working in Sweden," Brunetti predicts. And while political corruption may be as rank as ever, "compared to Argentina, we are living in Switzerland." But as a dutiful Italian son, the commissario is still a soft touch for a grandmother who begs him to investigate the near-drowning "accident" that left her granddaughter mentally impaired. It's a bittersweet story that makes us appreciate Brunetti's philosophical take on the indignities, insanities and cruelties of life: "Better to think like a Neapolitan and view it all as theater, as farce." LISA LUTZ HAS written a number of clever comic mysteries about the Spellmans, a family of screwball sleuths. In THE PASSENGER (Simon & Schuster, $25.99), she steps smartly out of her comfort zone to write a dead-serious thriller (with a funny bone) about a Wisconsin woman who dashes cross-country when her husband dies in a fall and she knows she'll be accused of killing him. The name of this fugitive is Tanya Dubois, but she sheds it for a series of noms de crime (and wardrobe changes and hair colors and getaway cars) when she's running for her life from unknown assassins. In a refreshing twist, she's not awfully good at disguising herself, so it's only when she's taken in hand by a rogue bartender, a woman called Blue, that Tanya/Amelia/Debra/Emma/Sonia/Paige/Jo/Nora has a real chance of surviving - once she helps Blue bury the husband Blue murdered. "Goodbye, Jack," the unrepentant widow says at his graveside. "Sorry how things worked out. But you only have yourself to blame." ALTHOUGH I WOULD categorically deny it if cornered, I secretly enjoy the various dramatic, even (soap) operatic developments in the lives of fictional sleuths. And there are plenty of these in THE STEEL KISS (Grand Central, $28), Jeffery Deaver's unsettling procedural mystery featuring Lincoln Rhyme. That brilliant quadriplegic consulting detective is no longer working criminal cases for the New York Police Department, which has distanced him from his colleague and lover, the homicide detective Amelia Sachs. In her absence, Rhyme has acquired a brainy assistant, Juliette Archer, also a quadriplegic and possibly a soul mate. At the same time, Nick Carelli, an ex-cop who was Sachs's previous lover, is out of prison and making an impassioned case for his innocence. These are the kinds of intrusions that would normally distract from the forensic detail for which Deaver's darkly witty series is noted. But here they serve to heighten the tensions of the plot and complicate the efforts of Rhyme and his troops to stop "the People's Guardian," a domestic terrorist who has been sabotaging (to stomach-churning effect) the mechanics of supposedly trusty equipment and appliances, from escalators and alarm systems to pacemakers and baby monitors.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 6, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Norway, 1978. A long-haired hit man with a reluctant trigger finger arrives in Kåsund, a remote village in the far north, fleeing a vindictive drug lord known as the Fisherman. Unprepared and unprovisioned, he meets Lea Sara and her son, Knut, devout adherents to Læstadian Lutheranism, who provide him with shelter and other necessities despite his lame cover story. Lea's husband has been lost at sea, and, as a halting friendship develops, the hit man, who calls himself Ulf, begins to wonder whether it could become something more. In this continuation of Blood on the Snow (2015), Nesbø deftly portrays the endless summer sun and empty stillness of Ulf's refuge, and fills in Ulf and Lea's troubled histories with economical brushstrokes. The sense of impending menace builds almost invisibly until both damaged souls discover real reasons to live at the moment it could all be taken away from them. Crime novel, character study, and closed-society romance, it all balances nicely until an improbable escape and an ending that feels just a little too pat. It's hard to be too dark when the sun won't stop shining. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Though the Harry Hole series has been the best-selling Nesbø's biggest draw, any book from Scandinavian noir's top living writer will be on wish lists and holds lists. Have this on hand at your library.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Jon, the narrator of this excellent standalone from Edgar-finalist Nesbo, is a "fixer," or hit man, akin to the hero of 2015's Blood on Snow. Jon, who has done jobs for an Oslo crime boss known as the Fisherman, has fled the city for Kåsund, a tiny village in the far north populated by Sami (Lapps) and dominated by a very strict religious ethos. Taking refuge in a church, he tells the townspeople he meets that his name is Ulf. A stranger in a strange land, Ulf slowly reveals what led him to leave Oslo: a failed hit and a theft that has Johnny Moe, the Fisherman's henchman, after him. Ulf is a bad boy with a heart of gold; he got into trouble because he was trying to help someone close to him. His self-mocking deprecations are endearing: "Not that I'm an irresponsible or careless person; I've just got really bad judgment." Immaculately plotted and perfectly paced, the book is also darkly funny and deadly serious. Scandinavian gloom notwithstanding, it has a neatly satisfying and surprisingly moving ending. Agent: Niclas Salomonsson, Salomonsson Agency (Sweden). (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Nesbo quickly follows up his stand-alone novel Blood on Snow with a second short book in this new series. Jon is on the run from his boss, a powerful crime lord called the Fisherman, not only because he faked killing a man who stole from the Fisherman but also, albeit for an altruistic purpose, he took the money the supposed dead man had stolen. Now calling himself Ulf, Jon flees north to Norway's isolated and underpopulated Arctic Circle, where time seems to have stopped. Desperate for a place to hide, he accepts help from the quirky citizens, first from a nine-year-old boy and his mother, then a local shopkeeper. In perpetual fear of being caught by the Fisherman's henchmen, Ulf soon worries about the lives of those who are aiding him. VERDICT Nesbo delivers a tale of hope and redemption in this brief story of a man who blunders into a life of crime and then tries to extricate himself with a minimum of damage to those around him. Although this is unlike the author's gritty "Harry Hole" stories, it is wholeheartedly recommended for Nesbo fans and readers who enjoy strong character development. [See Prepub Alert, 8/17/15.]-Deb West, -Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The world's worst hit man goes aground in a little Norwegian town far above the Arctic Circle in this sharp, spare, postcard-sized tale. Entry-level drug dealer Jon Hansen never wanted to kill anybodyhis trigger finger refuses to do the job every time he's called on to shootand that's probably why he never did. Even though his shadowy boss, the Fisherman, the drug king of Norway, knows he killed Toralf Jonsen over an unpaid debt, the big boss is wrong; Jon only loaned his childhood friend the gun he ended up using to shoot himself. So when the Fisherman, who was also Toralf's employer, asks Jon to kill Gustavo King, another underling who owes him big-time, he's taking more of a chance than he thinks. Jon can't shoot Gustavo, and he's relieved when Gustavo offers to pay him and disappear. Things can't possibly go as smoothly as that, of course, and they don't. The Fisherman gets wind of his quarry's escape and sends Jon's replacement, the far more capable assassin Johnny Moe, first after Gustavo, then after Jon. Will Jon be able to stay hidden in the tiny hunting cabin he's occupied outside the hamlet of Ksund, which is so intimate that even 10-year-old Knut Sara knows he's a rotten shot? And if Johnny tracks him down to his frigid lair, will the locals who've come to know himespecially Knut's mother, recently widowed Lea Sara, and her father, a stern evangelical pastor, come together to protect him more successfully than he protected Gustavo? Wasting not a word, Nesb (Blood on Snow, 2015, etc.) paints an indelible portrait of a criminal loser who reflects when he's faced with the supreme threat to his existence that "it was actually hard to think of anyone who was more dispensable than me." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
