Police by Jo Nesbø***

Reading Dates: 18 December 2017 – 03 January 2018

I am not going to lie: if there ever was a book that could fall into the category of guilty pleasures (bearing in mind guilt is something I rarely feel), it is this one. Full of cliff hangers, whodunnit surprises, ruthless plot lines and relatively flowing prose. BUT, I found it far too manipulative, as if the book knew how to extract maximum eagerness from me and then drop it. It is a rollercoaster but like the rides, pretty inconsequential. It is a good reading experience but at the back of my mind, I get a sense of déjà lu. What happens seems to happen to poor Harry (whom I am very fond of, by the way) rather a lot. He just collects more physical scars but he somehow has a mental resilience that basically just reveals the artifice. I know, I know that writing literary crime fiction is hard, but this is why I very much admire David Peace, Denise Mina and Louise Welsh. They know when to stop. Unlike me perhaps … I will read the next Hole book, of course. Nothing wrong with an occasional guilty pleasure …