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Summary
Summary
The internationally acclaimed author of Blood on Snow and the Harry Hole novels now gives us the tightly wound tale of a man running from retribution, a renegade hitman who goes to ground far above the Arctic circle, where the never-setting sun might slowly drive a man insane.
He calls himself Ulf--as good a name as any, he thinks--and the only thing he's looking for is a place where he won't be found by Oslo's most notorious drug lord: the Fisherman. He was once the Fisherman's fixer, but after betraying him, Ulf is now the one his former boss needs fixed--which may not be a problem for a man whose criminal reach is boundless. When Ulf gets off the bus in K sund, on Norway's far northeastern border, he sees a "flat, monotonous, bleak landscape . . . the perfect hiding place. Hopefully."
The locals--native Sami and followers of a particularly harsh Swedish version of Christianity--seem to accept Ulf's explanation that he's come to hunt, even if he has no gun and the season has yet to start. And a bereaved, taciturn woman and her curious, talkative young son supply him with food, the use of a cabin deep in the woods, a weapon--and companionship that stirs something in him he thought was long dead.
But the agonizing wait for the inevitable moment when the Fisherman's henchmen will show--the midnight sun hanging in the sky like an unblinking, all-revealing eye--forces him to question if redemption is at all possible or if, as he's always believed, "hope is a real bastard."
Author Notes
Jo Nesbø was born on March 29, 1960 in Molde, Norway. He graduated from the Norwegian School of Economics with a degree in economics and business administration. He worked as a freelance journalist and a stockbroker before he began his writing career. He is the author of The Harry Hole series and The Doctor Proctor series. The 2011 film Headhunters is based on his novel Hodejegerne (The Headhunters). In 2017 he made The New York Times Best Seller List with his title, The Thirst. He is also the main vocalist and songwriter for the Norwegian rock band Di Derre.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
THE FINNMARK PLATEAU is known as a beautiful spot. "Isn't that just the sort of thing people say about inhospitable places?" reflects the antihero of MIDNIGHT SUN (Knopf, $23.95), Jo Nesbo's character study of a fugitive Norwegian hit man. Jon Hansen has fled Oslo for this desolate land above the Arctic Circle, trying to escape the wrath of his boss, a mobster known as the Fisherman. Working as his debt collector and fixer was an easy job - until Hansen botched a murder and found himself in the Fisherman's cross hairs. Although it follows too closely the plot of a previous book, "Blood on Snow," this forcefully written story of personal defeat, despair and salvation, translated by Neil Smith, sends a man off to lose himself in the wilderness - where he finds himself instead. Introspective and sensitive, Hansen is the polar opposite of Harry Hole, Nesbo's far more commanding series detective. After moving into a cabin in the woods with no plumbing or electricity, Hansen settles down to brood about his worthless life. ("I'm just a pathetic, weak fool.") But a few days of that is enough to make him more receptive to the locals. The most interesting are Mattis, a keen-witted Laplander who persuades him to attend a strangely pagan wedding where he drinks fermented reindeer milk, and a 10-year-old named Knut, who introduces him to his mother, Lea, an abused wife (and soon-to-be widow). Lea and Knut are members of a harsh religious sect that promises an afterlife of fire and brimstone for sinners like Hansen. "It's only a stone's throw from the drumming of a shaman and witchcraft to the Laestadians' speaking in tongues," Mattis observes. But to a man desperate for redemption (and a hard-boiled author in need of a rest), this forbidding land, with its peculiar customs, proves irresistibly seductive. DONNA LEON'S VENETIAN mysteries never disappoint, calling up the romantic sights and sounds of La Serenissima even as they acquaint us with the practical matters that concern the city's residents. In THE WATERS OF ETERNAL YOUTH (Atlantic Monthly, $26), Venetians are troubled by an aggressive new wave of African immigrants, the latest street hustles aimed at tourists and the "pharaonically expensive" engineering project meant to keep the lagoon from flooding. Commissario Guido Brunetti and his colleagues are also afraid Italy might be losing its edge: The younger officers aren't nearly as willing as the older generation to bend the rules for a good cause. "Soon it'll be like working in Sweden," Brunetti predicts. And while political corruption may be as rank as ever, "compared to Argentina, we are living in Switzerland." But as a dutiful Italian son, the commissario is still a soft touch for a grandmother who begs him to investigate the near-drowning "accident" that left her granddaughter mentally impaired. It's a bittersweet story that makes us appreciate Brunetti's philosophical take on the indignities, insanities and cruelties of life: "Better to think like a Neapolitan and view it all as theater, as farce." LISA LUTZ HAS written a number of clever comic mysteries about the Spellmans, a family of screwball sleuths. In THE PASSENGER (Simon & Schuster, $25.99), she steps smartly out of her comfort zone to write a dead-serious thriller (with a funny bone) about a Wisconsin woman who dashes cross-country when her husband dies in a fall and she knows she'll be accused of killing him. The name of this fugitive is Tanya Dubois, but she sheds it for a series of noms de crime (and wardrobe changes and hair colors and getaway cars) when she's running for her life from unknown assassins. In a refreshing twist, she's not awfully good at disguising herself, so it's only when she's taken in hand by a rogue bartender, a woman called Blue, that Tanya/Amelia/Debra/Emma/Sonia/Paige/Jo/Nora has a real chance of surviving - once she helps Blue bury the husband Blue murdered. "Goodbye, Jack," the unrepentant widow says at his graveside. "Sorry how things worked out. But you only have yourself to blame." ALTHOUGH I WOULD categorically deny it if cornered, I secretly enjoy the various dramatic, even (soap) operatic developments in the lives of fictional sleuths. And there are plenty of these in THE STEEL KISS (Grand Central, $28), Jeffery Deaver's unsettling procedural mystery featuring Lincoln Rhyme. That brilliant quadriplegic consulting detective is no longer working criminal cases for the New York Police Department, which has distanced him from his colleague and lover, the homicide detective Amelia Sachs. In her absence, Rhyme has acquired a brainy assistant, Juliette Archer, also a quadriplegic and possibly a soul mate. At the same time, Nick Carelli, an ex-cop who was Sachs's previous lover, is out of prison and making an impassioned case for his innocence. These are the kinds of intrusions that would normally distract from the forensic detail for which Deaver's darkly witty series is noted. But here they serve to heighten the tensions of the plot and complicate the efforts of Rhyme and his troops to stop "the People's Guardian," a domestic terrorist who has been sabotaging (to stomach-churning effect) the mechanics of supposedly trusty equipment and appliances, from escalators and alarm systems to pacemakers and baby monitors.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Excerpt CHAPTER 1 How are we to start this story? I wish I could say that we'll start at the beginning. But I don't know where it starts. Just like everyone else, I'm not truly aware of the real sequence of cause and effect in my life. Does the story start when I realised that I was only the fourth-best soccer player in the class? When Basse, my grandfather, showed me the drawings--his own drawings--of La Sagrada Família? When I took my first drag on a cigarette and heard my first track by the Grateful Dead? When I read Kant at university and thought I understood it? When I sold my first lump of hash? Or did it start when I kissed Bobby--who's actually a girl--or the first time I saw the tiny, wrinkled creature who would end up being called Anna screaming up at me? Perhaps it was when I was sitting in the Fisherman's stinking back room and he was telling me what he wanted me to do. I don't know. We store up all sorts of stories with fabricated logic, so that life can look as though it has some meaning. So I may as well start here, in the midst of the confusion, at a time and a place where fate seemed to be taking a short break, holding its breath. When, just for a moment, I thought I was not only on my way, but had also already arrived. I got off the bus in the middle of the night. Screwed my eyes up against the sun. It was scouring across an island out to sea, off to the north. Red and dull. Like me. Beyond it lay yet more sea. And, beyond that, the North Pole. Perhaps this was somewhere they wouldn't find me. I looked round. In the three other points of the compass low mountain ridges sloped down towards me. Red and green heather, rocks, a few clumps of stunted birch trees. To the east the land slid into the sea, stony and flat as a pancake, and to the southwest it was as if it had been cut with a knife at the point where the sea started. A hundred metres or so above the motionless sea a plateau of open landscape took over, stretching inland. The Finnmark plateau. The end of the line, as Grandfather used to say. The hard-packed gravel road I stood on led to a cluster of low buildings. The only thing that stuck out was the church tower. I'd woken up in my seat on the bus just as we were passing a sign with the name "Kåsund" on it, down by the shore, near a wooden jetty. And I thought, why not? and pulled the cord above the window to illuminate the stop sign above the bus driver. I put on the jacket of my suit, grabbed my leather case and started walking. The pistol in the jacket pocket bounced against my hip. Right on the bone--I'd always been too thin. I stopped and tugged my money belt down under my shirt so that the notes would cushion the knocks. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the air was so clear that I felt I could see a very long way. As far as the eye can see, as the expression goes. They say that the Finnmark plateau is beautiful. Fucked if I know. Isn't that just the sort of thing people say about inhospitable places? Either to make themselves seem a bit tough, to lay claim to some sort of insight or superiority, the way people boast about liking incomprehensible music or unreadable literature? I'd done it myself. I used to think it might make up for at least a few of the things about me that weren't good enough. Or else it was simply meant as a consolation to the few people who had to live there: "It's so beautiful here." Because what was so beautiful about this flat, monotonous, bleak landscape? It's like Mars. A red desert. Uninhabitable and cruel. The perfect hiding place. Hopefully. The branches of a clump of trees by the side of the road in front of me moved. A moment later a figure leaped across the ditch and onto the road. My hand went automatically for the pistol but I stopped it: it wasn't one of them. This character looked like a joker who'd jumped straight out of a pack of cards. "Good evening!" he called to me. He walked towards me with a strange, rolling gait, so bandy-legged that I could see the road stretch out towards the village between his legs. As he came closer I saw he wasn't wearing a court jester's hat on his head but a Sámi cap. Blue, red and yellow--only the bells were missing. He was wearing pale leather boots, and his blue anorak, patched with black tape, had several tears revealing yellow-coloured padding that looked more like loft insulation than feathers. "Forgive me asking," he said. "But who are you?" He was at least two heads shorter than I. His face was broad, his grin wide, and his eyes at something of a slant. If you piled up all the clichés people in Oslo have about what a Sámi or native Laplander looked like, you'd end up with this bloke. "I came on the bus," I said. "So I saw. I'm Mattis." "Mattis," I repeated, to gain a few seconds to think about the answer to his next inevitable question. "Who are you, then?" "Ulf," I said. It seemed as good a name as any. "And what are you doing in Kåsund?" "I'm just visiting," I said, nodding towards the cluster of houses. "Who are you visiting?" I shrugged. "No one special." "Are you from the Countryside Commission, or are you a preacher?" I didn't know what people from the Countryside Commission looked like, so I shook my head and ran a hand through my long, hippy hair. Maybe I should cut it. Less eye-catching. "Forgive me asking," he said again, "but what are you, then?" "A hunter," I said. It might have been the mention of the Countryside Commission. And it was as much the truth as it was a lie. "Oh? Are you going to hunt here, Ulf?" "Looks like good hunting territory." "Yes, but you're a week early. Hunting season doesn't start until the fifteenth of August." "Is there a hotel here?" The Sámi smiled broadly. He coughed and spat out a brown lump that I hoped was chewing tobacco or something similar. It hit the ground with an audible splat. "Lodging house?" I asked. He shook his head. "Camping cabin? Room to rent?" On the telephone pole behind him someone had stuck up a poster about a dance band who were going to be playing in Alta. So the city couldn't be too far away. Maybe I should have stayed on the bus until it got there. "How about you, Mattis?" I said, slapping away a gnat that was biting my forehead. "You wouldn't happen to have a bed I could borrow tonight?" "I burned my bed in the stove back in May. We had a cold May." "Sofa? Mattress?" "Mattress?" He spread his hands out towards the heather-covered plateau. "Thanks, but I like roofs and walls. I'll have to try and find an empty dog kennel. Goodnight." I set off towards the houses. "The only kennel you'll find in Kåsund is that one," he called out plaintively, his voice falling. I turned round. He was pointing at the building in front of the cluster of houses. "The church?" He nodded. "Is it open in the middle of the night?" Mattis tilted his head. "Do you know why no one steals anything in Kåsund? Because there's nothing worth stealing apart from reindeer." Excerpted from Midnight Sun by Jo Nesbø All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
