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Finished Jo Nesbø's The Snowman, 7th in his Harry Hole series, which I got in a deep-discount priced omnibus edition on sale this long weekend from Kobo.
I'd previously seen and enjoyed the film adaptation of and then went and read his standalone secret-criminal vs. secret-criminal wtf-is-going-on thriller novel Headhunters, so I guess I kind of had a vague idea of what I might expect from another Nesbø book.
There were indeed quite a lot of twists and turns and deliberately planted misdirection, with fingers being pointed in all directions at possible suspects for the ultimate serial killer role, gradually eliminating them one-by-one just as you think the case is finally solved. And it was pretty jumpy with the flashbacks and the explanatory personal reminiscing.
But it really wasn't all that much of a mystery as to whodunnit, which I was able to figure out relatively soon even amidst all the red herrings (I'm usually very bad at these). This really was much more on the psychological crime thriller side of a police procedural, with a lot of lingering on the possible motives of the suspects, and the personal dysfunctions which might have led them to kill and kill again.
As mentioned upthread, I liked the partially-Bergen setting of this, which was sprinkled with local flavour tidbits like the Bergenser dialect (apparently a bit non-standard for Norwegian speech).
And I liked the in-story acknowledgement of how this multi-city taunting-clue-leaving serial killer thing was very unusual for low-crime-rate Norway and nobody really had experience with it besides Harry, who had to be specially trained by the FBI for it and then field-tested in Australia which presumably has many more compulsively trail-leaving multiple-murderers to practice upon, and making it a plot point that the regular homicide department was out of their league with this.
It was a nice contrast to a lot of cozier murder mystery-type series which just seem to find it de rigueur to have an anomalously high and continually escalating murder rate which never occasions comment from the small sleepy local villagers who are usually doing all the killing so maybe that's why they don't talk about it.
Overall, I liked this enough to continue with the series, which is just as well because I've already bought another omnibus with some earlier novels in the series using one of the recent 75% off Kobo coupons.
Moderate recommend, if you like this kind of thing. It doesn't strike me as particularly outstanding amidst the usual sort of police procedural serial killer thrillers involving a hardened borderline dysfunctional personally unbalanced yet ultimately professionally brilliant maverick detective hunting down a compulsively clue-leaving sicko who may or may not have developed a fixation on him and is taking the pursuit as a personal challenge by beginning to target him personally.
But there were interesting bits and the story played out well enough and I enjoyed the use of the setting, even if this particular subgenre is not really the kind of thing I usually read.
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