Killing Moon by Jo Nesbo

Killing Moon is the 12th Harry Hole novel by Jo Nesbo, published in paperback in 2024. I was very happy when I spotted it in my local Sainsbury’s, as it’s been a few years since the previous Harry Hole – Knife. Jo Nesbo is one of my favourite authors and one of the first thriller writers I read. I started my thriller journey in the mid-noughties with Patricia Cornwell, then read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, like everyone did at the time. Then I moved onto Jo Nesbo and Harry Hole.

It took me a few days to get into Killing Moon, just because life got in the way. It took me five days to read the first 100 pages, but then I read 15o pages the next day and I was hooked! I remembered just how much I love Harry Hole and what a fantastic writer Jo Nesbo is. He really is in a class of his own.

Harry Hole is no longer with the police and is once more trying to stay on top of his alcoholism. He is consumed by thoughts of his dead wife, Rakel, and dead friend.

Two women have gone missing in Oslo. When the first is found, murdered in the most brutal way, the police fear they have a serial killer on their hands. When they ask Harry Hole – the one man who really understands serial killers – for help, he is reluctant. But he desperately needs the money, so he agrees to work on the case. If he fails, he could lose everything.

The story is told from several viewpoints, including that of the murderer. So, on one level, the reader knows who the murderer is from fairly early in the book. But we don’t exactly know who it is. There are several suspects. Some of them get arrested and some the reader suspects might be the murderer.

Killing Moon is a real page turner. It is very well written and a really intriguing story. Strangely, the murderer reminds me quite a bit of the murderer in Mermaids Singing by Val McDermid, the previous book I read. Both murderers are quite smug about how good they are at killing. The murder weapon in Killing Moon is like nothing I’ve read before.

If you enjoy detective novels, I would really recommend Killing Moon and the Harry Hole novels in general. It works well as a standalone novel, but you might also want to read the series (I’d give the first two, The Bat and Cockroaches, a miss, as they are not as strong as the other novels).