Hary Hole again intends to disappear at the end of The Leopard, but the Norwegian capital clearly has a hold over Jo Nesbø's famously dark detective, as 2012's Phantom (Norwegian: Gjenferd, originally published 2011) opens with the scarred and newly-metallic-fingered Hole returning to Oslo. Hole has changed, though, as he is now definitely no longer a Norwegian policeman, and has in fact been working in what might be termed "debt collection", or perhaps "standover tactics" in Hong Kong, a development hinted at towards the end of the earlier novel.
Oslo, too, has changed. The police no longer turn a blind eye to drug dealing in certain parts of the city, and in asides we learn that the more "traditional" drug of heroin has been replaced by something known as "violin". Hole's adversaries from The Leopard - Mikael Bellman and his loyal underling Truls Berntsen - remain in their police careers, with Bellman re-assigned to head the division focusing on organised crime, which appears to focus on a criminal known only as "the man from Dubai".
So what's brought Hole back from the Orient this time? He initially requests permission from his former boss to investigate the murder of a young junkie, Gusto Hanssen. This is an unusual request, since the case appears to be straightforward, and a suspect has already been arrested. There is, of course, more to it than that - Oleg, the son of Hole's former girlfriend Rakel - is the arrested suspect. While mother and son had left Norway after the events of The Snowman, it emerges that they have returned, and that Oleg has gone off the rails, falling in with drugs and petty crime. Hole, perhaps unsurprisingly, blames himself and simply can't believe that the boy he knew a few short years before could have killed someone else.
On meeting Oleg - in a particularly touching series of scenes - it is revealed that the young man blames Hole for his troubles as well, and much of the early plot of the novel is played against the need for the father-son relationship (such as it was) to be restored.
Hole's investigations into the murder take him further into the new underworld in Oslo, uncovering a complex web of political and personal corruption uniting crime, the police and the government, and where it is never entirely clear who is using whom. In many ways, this investigation owes a lot to the classic noir fiction from the USA more than half a century ago. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to have seen Sam Spade or any of the other key figures of that style of fiction conducting inquiries.
The weakness of the novel, to be honest, is the sheer complexity of this corruption. Nesbø relies quite heavily on a "narrative" from the deceased Gusto Hanssen to explain some of the more abstruse points, as it gradually emerges that this may not have been a "regular" murder of a junkie or drug dealer. Unfortunately, Hanssen's exposition of the plot doesn't always keep pace with Hole's investigation, and the former detective is left more than once chasing up a red herring which the reader already knows the resolution to.
This isn't always a problem, due again to that self-same complexity. There were just as many points where I was grateful that Hanssen would explain something Hole's narrative had hinted at - or vice versa. All of this probably militates against the novel being good "beach reading", a comment I find slightly ironic as I in fact did read this during a holiday at the beach.
Perhaps more than many of the Hole novels, Phantom requires an awareness of the past incidents in Hole's chequered career. His delicate relationship with Rakel plays a considerable role in the plot development here, as do the favours he had earned during The Redeemer. Moreover, the experience of reading the earlier instalments will demonstrate whether Hole really is the detective the reader wants to follow. Nesbø again pulls very few punches, and has no qualms about putting his man into some very tough situations, both physically and ethically.
4 stars overall, for a very complex plot which somehow holds together.
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