Review: Vivien Horler

Wolf Hour, by Jo Nesbo, translated by Robert Ferguson (Harvill Secker)

When you’re on a one-man crusade against gun violence, how do you fight it? By shooting the perpetrators, of course.

Jo Nesbo is an international crime fiction sensation who has sold 60 million books worldwide, and the fact he writes in Norwegian is no barrier to his enthusiastic reception by readers of all languages.

This stand-alone thriller is set entirely in Minneapolis, Minnesota, apparently once settled by Norwegian immigrants, but now as diverse as many parts of the US, despite President Donald Trump’s rejection of the concept.

Minneapolis is the city where George Floyd, a black man, was murdered by a white police officer in 2020.

But this story begins in September 2022, when Holger Rudi flies into Minnesota from Oslo, researching a novel about a policeman of Norwegian heritage.

It’s also about his cousin, someone he spent holidays with as a teenager, who died in peculiar circumstances.

When the immigration officer asks Rudi if he’s a writer, he wants to reply that he’s a taxidermist – he stuffs things. He’s in Minneapolis “to clothe a character, someone in a story I already have clear in my mind”.

But you don’t mess with US immigration officers, and besides, Rudi’s tired. “Yes,” he says.

He thinks later he could have told the immigration officer the purpose of his visit was to get inside the head of a killer back in 2016. Rudi is writing a true crime thriller, and he tells us true crime is the hottest genre in the book market right now.

“People just can’t get enough of stories about blood and preferably spectacular murders – there’s the air of mystery, unexpected turns of events, villains and heroes on both sides of the law…”

His job is to try to understand why what happened did happen.

In October 2016 a small-time arms dealer – he sells arms of various calibres to baddies, usually rivals in the drugs trade – is shot in the street from an apartment in a high-rise behind him.

The troubled homicide cop – aren’t all the cops in detective thrillers troubled?  – Bob Oz (the American version of the Norwegian name Aass) who arrives to investigate, withdraws as soon as he realises the victim isn’t actually dead.

But he does check the apartment from which the bullets, judging by their trajectory, were fired. And finds in the trash can an empty diabetic pen box labelled Tomas Gomez.

A neighbour tells the police they think Gomez might have had contact with another neighbour, Mrs White, two floors up. When they call on Mrs White it turns out he had. In fact before he left the apartment, apparently for the last time, he gave her a pot plant.

She adds he had been devoted to his cat, who died. She gestures to a canary in a cage, and says she had loved the bird. When it died she’d had it stuffed, as it was a comfort. She’d suggested Gomez have his cat stuffed too.

This leads the police to Mike Lunde of Town Taxidermy. It turns out Gomez had in fact taken his cat to him, and it is still in his freezer – Lunde’s been busy.

Lunde tells Oz he and Gomez had become slightly more than aacquaintances as Gomez told Lunde his story. Some years previously Gomez, a Mexican immigrant, his wife and two children, had gone to a fastfood restaurant for dinner. Warring drug dealers had attacked the place, leaving Gomez’s wife and two kids dead.

It would seem Gomez has become a one-man warrior against gun crime, using a rifle. A National Rifle Association rally is due to be held in Minneapolis, to be addressed by the mayor.

Will Gomez make his way into the stadium? Will he be stopped first? Will the mayor make it?

Will Oz cope when his ex-wife, and mother to their late toddler, tells him she’s pregnant by her new lover?

Will Liza, the bar lady at Bob’s favourite bar, come around to his questionable charms?

Like all good detective thrillers, this is a gripping read with some great twists. I enjoyed it immensely.