Lucy Knisley is a delightful, talented human being, and I will read every book she chooses to publish. This particular book is a record of her travels to Europe over the summer of 2011. She was invited to speak at a Norwegian comics convention in Bergen, and used the opportunity to travel to Sweden to visit a man she’d met several weeks before when he was vacationing in New York City. She also travels to France (Paris, and another city of which I’ve since forgotten […]
An unsuccessful glimpse inside the mind of a killer
Nesbo steps away from his standard Norwegian detective fare with this slim new novel that starts and ends with the blood of a murdered man soaking into the snow. Blood on Snow is written from the viewpoint of a mob “fixer,” a contract killer named Olav who is kept on the payroll of Oslo’s biggest crime boss to take care of problems that his boss doesn’t want to think about. These problems range from snitches to competitors to an unfaithful wife. And until Olav catches […]
A high-octane thriller that stretches credibility — if you care
This bloody action-packed Norwegian police procedural/thriller is as exciting and fast-paced in its telling as it is absurd in its plot. The “hero” is young Sonny Lofthus, a lifer and a drug addict who has spent the past 15 years behind bars copping to crimes committed by the crime syndicate that runs all manner of nasty operations in Oslo. In return, he is kept happily supplied with top quality heroin, to which the assistant warden is well paid to keep a blind eye. The broken […]
Miserable Weather + Terrible Taxes = Happy People?
If I’d just seen Michael Booth’s The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, I never would have read it. First of all, the cover of the Finnish edition is hokey as hell. Bad publisher. Go to your room and think of what you’ve done. Second of all, what would you think, if you saw a book that’s just 300 odd pages about Scandinavia and Scandinavian people? Boring, right? Booth mentions very early on that many people to whom he talked about his book project […]