translated by Robert Ferguson
“Downtown Minneapolis always made me think of cars from Motown in the eighties, trapped in a limbo between the past and the future. Everything clean and neat, conservative and dull, practical and boring…. If you asked someone from London, Paris or New York what he thought of when you mentioned Minneapolis, he would probably say lakes and forests.” —Holger Rudi, Wolf Hour
Not anymore, unfortunately. It’s hard to approach the new thriller from Jo Nesbø, Norway’s all-time best-selling author and king of Nordic noir, with that stereotypically bland vision of the city, given what’s happened there in the past two months. (This is where I should mention that I grew up outside of St. Paul and lived in Minneapolis for eight years.) But the book is set in Minneapolis circa 2016 and 2022, with the main action taking place in 2016, just prior to the election of Trump and four years before the murder of George Floyd.
Things were different then. It may take some effort to dispel the tear-gas-blurred images of neighborhoods under siege and videos of government-enabled abductions and murders. But Nesbø is such a fluent and persuasive storyteller that you adjust. And the issues he addresses—racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, guns—certainly play a part in the nightmare the city is now trapped in.
Our guide through the strange events of 2016 is Holger Rudi, a Norwegian true-crime writer. Rudi is visiting Minneapolis in 2022 to research a series of high-profile murders involving his American cousin that took place six years earlier. His observations are threaded through the troubled investigation by the disgraced police detective Bob Oz.
Bob is a throwback to the smartass maverick cop with demons and a drinking problem familiar to anyone who’s spent time with crime fiction, including Nesbø’s revered Harry Hole series. He’s hard to warm to at first, introduced as a low-rent Don Juan known as “One-Night Bob,” for his love-’em-and-leave-’em M.O. The mustard-yellow cashmere coat that is his personal style signifier sounds hideous, possibly intended as a nod to Dick Tracy’s trademark outerwear, but maybe better read as a note of caution.
But Bob is acting out for a reason; he went off the rails in the wake of a family tragedy, causing his wife to leave him. So our antihero is an emotionally traumatized man masquerading as a jerk, not taking his antidepressants, not going to anger-management classes, and definitely not playing well with others.
The issues Jo Nesbø addresses in Wolf Hour—racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, guns—certainly play a part in the nightmare the city is now trapped in.
The story begins with a sniper attack on a man who sells illegal guns to criminals, described from the shooter’s point of view. Suspicion falls on Tomás Gomez, a Mexican immigrant who has vanished from his tower-block apartment, where the shot came from.
Despite being suspended for violent behavior, Bob pursues his own investigation with the tacit cooperation of Kay Myers, the detective running the case and one of the few people on the force who tolerates him. As a Black woman, she can appreciate his relative outsider status.
Bafflement among the M.P.D. and fear in the community mount when another man is picked off in a shopping-mall parking lot. But as Bob connects the dots about the sniper’s choice of victims, he gets the feeling that Gomez may not be who they think he is. This intuition comes partly from his conversations with a mild-mannered taxidermist who was the last person to see Gomez alive.
It’s easy to drop spoilers with a book as intricately plotted as Wolf Hour, so that’s where I’ll leave it. It’s very much a fair-play mystery, with breadcrumbs scattered strategically along the way—watch for the reference to Hitchcock’s Psycho early on. The violence and macabre elements that are Nesbø’s trademarks emerge gradually and organically, building to a chilling conclusion.
Having visited Minneapolis himself in 2022 to research this book, Nesbø lays down the sociological and psychological groundwork for the multiple tragedies that unfold without getting polemical about it. There’s also plenty of irony here—a sniper who hates guns, descendants of white immigrants hostile to more recent, nonwhite immigrants, a stone-cold killer with delicate sensibilities. Nesbø likes to throw out these contradictions and let us make of them what we will.
After all, Minneapolis itself holds many contradictions. A bastion of normie-dom that somehow produced an eccentric genius like Prince. A glass-and-steel downtown surrounded by lakes and waterfalls. And now a steadfast resistance made up of retirees, nurses, knitters, Jesse Ventura, and, yes, wine moms. If Nesbø brings back Bob Oz, he’ll have a changed city to write about.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mysteries for Air Mail. She lives in New York City