Knife by Jo Nesbo**
Reading dates: 21 December 2019 – 01 January 2020
I picked up this book while on holiday in Egypt, sad to start the last Ferrante. It was very disappointing. From the uneven chapters, to the red herrings and even the narrative. I still love Harry Hole as a character but I felt him far fetched and a bit clichéd in this novel. Perhaps the book is not as good as some of his others, perhaps Ferrante has opened my eyes and made me wake up from the crime fiction stupor I have been in for the last few years. Nesbo had to make some pretty tough decisions as to the fate of some key characters but I am not sure these are the right ones; the odds of betrayal around Harry are getting quite ridiculous and this makes him less defined, more shapeless. There is also some nuggets around the Afganistan war and PTSD which, in my opinion, are not followed enough. That’s my basic problem with it: interesting threads (too many of them), pulled wispily and then dropped. It has no coherence. Form over substance.