Finally, in each Hole novel, a different woman close to Hole is murdered, kidnapped, assaulted or otherwise made miserable. Second, another senior Oslo cop turns up - the same guy in three of the books - who loathes Hole and is operating to a wicked personal agenda. First, the murderer in each book is of the serial kind. Three common themes run through the five earlier novels. He seems to wonder about that himself and talks of soon giving up his detecting career. It’s hard to imagine how a guy like Hole with a perpetual hangover manages to get the sleuthing job done. Not merely an elbow-bending tosspot, he qualifies as a bottom-of-the-bottle alcoholic. What separates Hole from other renegades among police detectives is his drinking problem. Nesbo presented Hole as a maverick cop, the kind of character hardly unknown in the genre. He wrote sharp and often funny dialogue, and he moved the plots along at a brisk pace, although, ominously, he turned a touch windy in The Snowman, the novel that immediately precedes The Leopard. In the previous five Harry Hole books, Nesbo’s brilliance as a writer seemed unquestioned. And, oh dear God, there are 200 more pages still to go, surely room enough to drive us to a state of reader fatigue that could be terminal. Wait a minute Nesbo says it’s Harry who’s tired of all these burdens? What about us poor readers? At this stage of the endlessly oppressive book, we’re frantic with exhaustion, worn down by the relentless excess of blood and suffering and murder. But right now most tired of grown men who never tired of playing cock of the walk. Tired of being on the receiving end, tired of being afraid, tired of always being too late.
On page 429 of The Leopard, the Norwegian author Jo Nesbo’s new novel in his series featuring Inspector Harry Hole of the Oslo Police, Nesbo writes of Hole’s weariness:
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