[ATDrake]

Finished Jo Nesbø's Cockroaches, 2nd in his Harry Hole, Dysfunctional Yet Brilliant Norwegian Sometimes-Inspector series.

Like #1, The Bat, this is another one of Harry's cases which actually takes him outside Norway to investigate the murder of a Norwegian citizen in foreign lands.

I wonder a bit if this had been The Plan* when Nesbø originally conceived the series, to have Harry wander around the world solving crime for King and Country in exotic locales, making friends enemies and influencing people (to try and kill him as well).

In any case, from #3 and forward, Harry's cases are firmly grounded in Norwegian soil, and some of the groundwork for that is laid in this, which introduces some of his future Oslo colleagues and opponents.

Like all the Hole books, Harry is decidedly a fish out of water, which is something even more noticeable later in Oslo than in Bangkok, for reasons that hit me when reading the introductory chapters to this, because many of Harry's present and future Oslo cast are often from law enforcement families (several of his co-workers have had a now-deceased father in the force), or are ambitious rank-climbing career policepersons. Whereas Harry's father is a former teacher who doesn't care for his son's atypical job and Harry himself doesn't care for the politics and position-jockeying and favour-keeping payback that high-level police positions entail: he just wants to solve crime, full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.

Anyway, in Thailand, Harry's misfit ways are more easily passed off as being the visiting foreign investigator cushioned by the co-operative locals, just as he was in Australia. This time, he's not The Only Norwegian in the area, as the local expat community appears to be heavily involved, and it was interesting to see the cultural admixture of Norwegians adapted to Thailand, as well as the view of Thai culture (as mostly seen through foreign perspective) itself.

While again, this doesn't quite have the style or deviousness of a typical Nesbø Hole book which would begin with #3, most of the signature elements are there, and it's a more tightly written, densely plotted, and better-unraveled story than The Bat.

I quite liked the local supporting cast in this, especially Harry's half-Thai American-born detective-in-charge counterpart Liz, and the briefly-seen forensics expert Supawadee, and there were interesting bits concerning international law enforcement agreements and backroom politicking on the Norwegian side to keep potential scandals under wraps.

Medium recommend. A solid installment of the series, with standalone appeal for those who might be drawn to the setting or cultural mix, even if not quite representative of what the Hole books get to be like later.

* In an author's note to one of his books or perhaps on his website, I'd read that Aaron Elkins had something similar in mind with his Gideon Oliver, Intrepid Globe-Trotting Forensic Anthropologist series, which apparently was originally intended to be more of an intrigue/adventure thriller series than the bone-handling murder mysteries they ended up being after the 1st book, and that the later Chris Norgren, Intrepid Globe-Trotting Art Forgery Detection Expert series was a kind of revisit to the original idea and did end up being the sort of intrigue/adventure books he'd had in mind to write.