Jo Nesbo is a Norwegian writer, musician, and former economist and reporter. As of March 2014, more than 3 million copies of his novels have been sold in Norway, and his work has been translated into over 40 languages, selling 30 million copies worldwide. He is known primarily for his crime novels featuring Inspector Harry Hole.
Following the traumatic Snowman case, a forerunning novel featuring police inspector Harry Hole, Hole has exiled himself in Hong Kong. Kaja Solness, a new Norwegian Crime Squad officer, tracks down Hole and asks for his help investigating possible serial killings in Oslo. Hole is convinced to return when told that his father, Olav, is seriously ill and will not live much longer. Hole returns to Norway to find that the Crime Squad is in the middle of a power struggle with Kripos and its power-hungry head, Mikael Bellman, who seeks to puts his agency in sole charge of the country's murder cases. Hole finds himself the target of Bellman's hostility, though Bellman is keen to take credit for the result of Hole's work.
Goodreads says:
In the depths of winter, a killer stalks the city streets. His victims are two young women, both found with twenty-four inexplicable puncture wounds, both drowned in their own blood. The crime scenes offer no clues, the media is reaching fever pitch, and the police are running out of options. There is only one man who can help them, and he doesn't want to be found. Deeply traumatised by The Snowman investigation, which threatened the lives of those he holds most dear, Inspector Harry Hole has lost himself in the squalor of Hong Kong's opium dens. But with his father seriously ill in hospital, Harry reluctantly agrees to return to Oslo. He has no intention of working on the case, but his instinct takes over when a third victim is found brutally murdered in a city park.
The victims appear completely unconnected to one another, but it's not long before Harry makes a discovery: the women all spent the night in an isolated mountain hostel. And someone is picking off the guests one by one. A heart-stopping thriller from the bestselling author of the The Snowman, The Leopard is an international phenomenon that will grip you until the final page.
Compared to the other novels in the series, The Leopard has a more cinematic and action-oriented style, taking place across three continents. The Leopard also contains excessive violence. Nesbø has expressed regret for a couple of scenes in the book.
What I thought:
As with the Nordic Noir genre of tv series, I enjoy crime thriller literature located in Scandinavian settings. The chill and dark of the northern landscape and the gritty temperaments of the characters in those landscapes add to the brooding atmosphere in which the detective action takes place. The Leopard is a fat paperback, some 600 pages in length, and I did find the novel was a shade longer than it needed to be with one or two red herrings leading to false endings as bit by bit all possible candidates for the killer were dangled in front of the reader and then ruled out. All the same it was a good read and at the time of reading, the violence in the narrative did not particularly strike me as more excessive than that which I have come to expect of a Nesbo crime novel.
