Following from Jo Nesbø’s electrifying international best-sellers The Snowman and The Leopard, now comes Phantom, which plunges the brilliant, deeply troubled, now former police officer Harry Hole into a full-tilt investigation on which his own tenuous future will come to depend.

When Harry left Oslo again for Hong Kong—fleeing the traumas of life as a cop—he thought he was there for good. But then the unthinkable happened. The son of the woman he loved, lost, and still loves is arrested for murder: Oleg, the boy Harry helped raise but couldn’t help deserting when he fled. Harry has come back to prove that Oleg is not a killer. Barred from rejoining the police force, he sets out on a solitary, increasingly dangerous investigation that takes him deep into the world of the most virulent drug to ever hit the streets of Oslo (and the careers of some of the city’s highest officials), and into the maze of his own past, where he will find the wrenching truth that finally matters to Oleg, and to himself.

About Jo Nesbo

JO NESBØ is a musician, songwriter, economist, and author. He has won the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel. His other Harry Hole novels include The Redbreast, Nemesis, The Devil’s Star, The Snowman, and The Leopard. He lives in Oslo. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett.

Harry Hole is back on crime beat in Jo Nesbo’s ‘Phantom’

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – October 26, 2012 (Excerpt)

Jo Nesbo, whose crime thrillers have sold more than 10 million copies in Europe and the U.S., has been anointed as the latest king of Scandinavian noir, the heir to the addictive-page-turning throne left vacant by the death of Stieg Larsson.

But reading his books in Los Angeles brings to mind a different archetypal noir figure: Michael Connelly’s tortured LAPD detective Harry Bosch.

Nesbo’s detective, who is featured in nine of his 16 books, including his latest, “Phantom,” is also named Harry. Harry Hole.

Like Bosch, Hole is an obsessive, depressive, combative, hard-drinking genius who views his city through bleak eyes even as he sacrifices his own sanity and relationships to save it.

His city is Oslo. Not the bright, social welfare state with the beneficent king; no, this Oslo is a dark and decaying place, haunted by its Nazi past, where drug addicts and murderers roam with impunity and the police force is too corrupt or politicized or stupid to do anything about it. [Read the full article...]

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