the last book I read

The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbø.

Meet Harry Hole. He's a maverick cop, who doesn't pay by the - hang on *checks notes* ah, I see we've met him before. You may assume that all the standard checklist items that applied last time - alcoholism, broken personal relationships, constantly on the verge of disciplinary procedures and/or dismissal from the force for general unreliability and, dammit, insufficient deference towards the pompous stuffed shirts at Norway Central, but a semi-mystical ability to sniff out wrongdoing and bring its perpetrators to justice - apply equally well here.

And Harry's mystical Crime Whisperer powers are sorely needed, because after a couple of murders in the central Oslo area it looks like the police might have a serial killer on their hands. Firstly Camilla Loen, shot in the head in her shower and found with one of her fingers removed and a small red five-pointed diamond under one eyelid. Then Lisbeth Barli, gone missing from the flat she shared with her husband, Wilhelm. No body, but the police receive a finger, verifiably hers, wearing a ring with the same five-pointed diamond in. And then Barbara Svendsen, a secretary at a legal firm, executed in the women's toilets at her office, and with the same symptoms (plus diamond, minus finger). 

Harry is assigned to the case, but there's a problem - his partner is Tom Waaler, a senior officer Harry strongly suspects not only of being corrupt but also of being involved in the killing of one of Harry's colleagues on a previous case, possibly in a bid to cover his own shady tracks. And sure enough while Tom and Harry get down to organising their investigation, and Harry gets down to trying to exert a bit of self-discipline and stay off the sauce while the case is in progress, Tom also makes it known that the reason he's swanning around in a fancy sports car while Harry is still running his knackered old Ford Escort is that he and a group of associates are involved with some, hem hem, extra-curricular activities which he'd really like to get Harry involved with, once he's proved his loyalty. Just the usual stuff like rubbing out people that the standard tedious police processes of actually gathering admissible evidence and the like can't touch.

Back on the case, Harry's detectival insights lead him to deduce that the murderer is choosing his murder targets not by their identity but by their location, the sites of the murders drawing out the points of a pentagram, a symbol of much mystical significance. The police's assumptions about where he will strike next turn out to be wrong, though, as it turns out Camilla Loen wasn't his first victim after all. Some further insights reveal that the likely murderer is the son of the occupant of the house at the fifth and final point of the pentagram, a man named Sven Sivertsen.

Sure enough Sivertsen is arrested and taken into custody, and Harry is given his first assignment by Tom Waaler: make sure Sivertsen has a tragic accident while in his cell. Instead, Harry busts Sivertsen out and spirits him away, having had one of those classic WAIT A MINUTE IT WAS SOMEONE ELSE ALL ALONG moments of clarity. And sure enough while Harry leaves Sven handcuffed to a radiator he goes and confronts the actual murderer, who turns out (SPOILER ALERT) to be Wilhelm Barti, wife of the disappeared Lisbeth, the whole satanic serial killer thing being an elaborate bit of hokum to throw the police off the scent of his actual motive - a bit of the old spousal murder, with the added spice of throwing suspicion onto Sven Sivertsen, his wife's secret lover. 

Wilhelm conveniently offs himself by jumping out of the window rather than face trial, and so Harry is free to return to Sven and detach him from the radiator. There is still a problem, though, and it's that Tom Waaler wanted Sven dead not just as a test of Harry's loyalty but also because Sven was involved with some gun-smuggling activities that Tom had a piece of and could potentially incriminate him. Tom then turns up with Harry's on-off girlfriend's son Oleg as a hostage, and a tense stand-off ensues, broken by Harry outwitting Tom and causing him to be sliced in two by a descending lift. 

So all's well that ends well, then: Harry tentatively decides to stay on as a detective, having considered jacking the whole thing in, not to mention flirting with the possibility of just being sacked, and tentatively rekindles his relationship with Rakel, Oleg's mother. That's all lovely, of course, but does illustrate a structural problem with the long-running troubled maverick cop series - it's going to be necessary to have Harry piss that domestic bliss and professional success up the wall by the start of the next book in the series, just so that he can navigate broadly the same narrative arc again there. It's almost as if there are actually twice as many stories in the series, the intervening ones featuring Harry getting back on the sauce and making disastrous professional and domestic decisions, and it's only the ones where the arc goes in the opposite direction that the author has chosen to write about. Same goes for the other rumpled genius types like Rebus and Wallander.

Those observations aside this is probably better than the other book in that series in this series (if you see what I mean), The Redeemer, whose plot turned on a couple of implausibilities that were a bit jarring even for the serial killer/maverick detective genre. That book is actually this one's immediate successor in the Harry Hole series - they are the fifth and sixth in the series respectively, although if Wikipedia is to be believed then The Devil's Star is actually the first of the series to be published in an English translation, in 2005. 

If you're as childish as me you'll be sniggering at Harry's surname, and perhaps at his creator's charmingly naïve failure to consider how that name would be rendered by English-speaking readers. You can imagine the screenwriters of any English-language adaptation having to be careful that they don't include any lines like these:

• you're a hell of a man, Hole
• clean yourself up - you look like a bum, Hole
• the suspect's being a real pain in the arse, Hole

If you're interested there are some tips on pronunciation here - basically imagine saying something like "who left the gas on?" and then stopping just before the "f" in "left". I can't say how they managed with it in the 2017 adaptation of The Snowman (starring Michael Fassbender as Harry), as his name doesn't feature in the trailer.

thomas' hill figures

A couple of further thoughts prompted by having a look through my new (well, new to me, anyway) copy of the Morris Marples book. Firstly, a bit of orientation for those new to the whole chalk hill-figure business: basically the only one of these with any claim to proper antiquity is the White Horse of Uffington, well-established as being at least late Bronze Age or early Iron Age and therefore most likely around 3000 years old. Almost all of the others were created in a spree of enthusiasm for the form lasting about 100 years from mid-18th to mid-19th century. The two giants at Cerne Abbas and Wilmington may have some claim to be older than that, and things like the Whiteleaf Cross and the Watlington White Mark may be Christian sanitisings of earlier pagan symbols (translation: GIANT COCKS) but it's all highly speculative and frankly not particularly convincing. Marples, to his credit, comes to much the same conclusion.

As I said in the previous post, I've visited the Uffington horse a few times, anything up to half-a-dozen or so I would guess. I recall also visiting the Cerne Abbas giant (including its GIANT COCK) during a family holiday when I was a teenager. The only other white horses I recall having actually seen are the Westbury one (which can be seen from the train) and the Cherhill one, which is visible from the A4 and which we stopped at at least once while I was being delivered from Newbury back to Bristol for the start of a university term. We also used to go to a pub on the outskirts of Chippenham (a few miles up the road) for lunch which was called The Lysley Arms at the time and which I see is now called The Pewsham. The food was very nice when we used to go there and looks pretty good now, though I will point out that - now I think about it - I haven't been there for over thirty years. I mean, Christ.

The only other one I think I've seen in the flesh, or in the chalk, if you will, is the Osmington horse which I have this picture of me in the vicinity of looking slightly fat and hungover (though still with a reasonably impressive head of hair) in January 2016. 

Osmington is also, you'll recall, the birthplace of cheese racing, the actual location being the campsite at Osmington Mills a couple of miles down the road from the horse.

Anyway, for no particular reason other than that it amused me to do it, here's the horses in their current form courtesy of Google Maps' aerial photography. 

Don't strain your eyes squinting for the last one, as it's not discernibly there any more (it would have been in the green strip at the bottom of the photo). It is listed in the Marples book as Woolborough but all present-day mapping lists the location as Woolbury. The horse, a small and pretty rough affair made out of flints embedded in the turf, was supposedly still there in the late 1990s after being rediscovered and tidied up a bit but now seems to have subsided beneath the vegetation again.