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.
