The Bat: Read the first thrilling Harry Hole novel from the No.1 Sunday Times bestseller (Harry Hole, 1)

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Harry Hole is an extremely determined detective, and after the fashion of a dog with a bone, he won’t let go. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Through Birgitta we get more of Harry's back story, which, having been following Harry, we learn he was an alcoholic.

I’m guessing that most of his (non-Australian) readers won’t have read anything by Indigenous Australians and might think he’s done a good thing.A young Norwegian girl taking a gap year in Sydney has been murdered, and Harry has been sent to Australia to assist in any way he can. At first I thought it was a young adult mystery because the sentence structure was so basic and simple. Lots of trying to get to a certain place in time that I think was supposed to feel tense and exciting but instead was pure nonsense.

Birgitta goes to surprise Harry at his hotel, but finds him a drunken mess with a hooker, things don't go well and there is a large argument. There is also a fair amount of padding in the middle of the book where I grew impatient with the author wandering off into rabbit trails instead of moving the story forward.The mystery itself is well-constructed, despite a number of sequences where the author would shove clues in our face. First of all, they take our people’s pride, and when it’s gone they’re scared to death of treading on it. When the team unearths a string of unsolved murders and disappearances, nothing will stop Harry from finding out the truth. This is also a novel that falls into a lot of the common holes of a hardboiled detective, but the lead character seems to be able to act without consequences for himself, which is frustrating. With a steady hand, Jo Nesbo deftly ties together the different narratives, steering the novel towards its goal with great precision.

It isn’t until one of Harry’s Australian police force colleagues passes away that his alcoholism comes to the fore, making him both brilliant in terms of solving the investigation and destructive in terms of the laws he’ll break to see justice done.This is the first of the Harry Hole novels, introducing the character, but it was very late in being translated to English. However, that’s also what makes the character of Harry Hole so appealing: he’s talented because of his flaws. She must have hit the cliffs on the way down; there were large chunks of flesh torn from her body when they found her.