Strip away the platitudes and the interior monologues, spare us the sentimentality and the self-justification, and this could have been a dark and muscular slice of noir that chills to the bone. I can't help feeling that somewhere inside this 490-page slab is a slick 250-page thriller fighting to get out. In that single respect, he may have come to understand that less is more.

The Son is larded with violence, though not as excessively as some of Nesbø's other work. Their backstories feel bolted on or, in the cases of the female characters, vestigial at best.Īll of this is delivered in laboured detail, except where there are questions about the mechanics of plot, when things are glossed over and presented as a fait accompli. Too many of them are also stock characters who are almost cartoonish in their qualities – the criminal mastermind with a preternatural knowledge of every element of street life throughout Oslo and beyond the wise, hard-working office cleaner who offers life insights to the detective the incompetent agent from the FBI-style agency outsmarted by the local cops the detective with the addiction problem. Their behaviour seems to come from the convoluted needs of the plot rather than from any understanding of what motivates people, and often seems unlikely to the point of perversity. The story unfolds via a string of improbable twists that failed to shock or surprise, mostly because I struggled to engage with any of the characters. Something is definitely rotten in the state of Norway. The creaking mechanics of this revenge tragedy rooted in corruption are set in motion when a dying prisoner tells Sonny that this version of events was a lie created to protect the real mole, that his father was indeed the honourable cop Sonny worshipped as a boy, and that the mole is still out there. One is now the police commissioner the third was Sonny Lofthus's father, who killed himself when he was about to be exposed as a mole supplying a criminal mastermind with inside information.

He started his career as one of a trio of inseparable friends. Simon Kefas is a veteran cop in the Oslo homicide bureau, a byword among his colleagues for dogged integrity.

The son nesbø novel