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Whenever I read fiction – something that never seems to happen consistently, but rather in sustained hungry gluts – I have serial addictions. This may be a throwback to when I was a child, and self-compelled to read all the Famous Five books, not to mention Malcolm Saville’s Lone Piners with their wonderful sense of place (mostly set in the Shropshire hills).

More recently, it’s been Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro, Daphne du Maurier, Richard Yates, Stieg Larsson – and now Jo Nesbo. My addictions are nothing if not diverse.

I don’t like reading groups.

I joined one briefly, when I first moved to Norfolk seven years ago, in the hope that joining a group of readers might be a route to getting to know a few people. It did the job, and then I left.

But I don’t need people telling me what to read, and I resent every reading moment away from my current addiction.

I discovered Jo Nesbo by chance. Passing through a railway station, I saw a poster advertising The Snowman, and proclaiming the writer ‘the new Stieg Larsson’. I’d read all three Stieg Larsson books, and knew that with his unfortunate death there were unlikely to be more forthcoming. Jo Nesbo, like Larsson, takes his central characters from one book to the next – a bit like the Famous Five and the Lone Piners. The Snowman is somewhere in the middle of the series, so after I finished it I had to backtrack. I’ve read the first two – both about 600 pages long – and now I’ve ordered another two from Amazon. Can’t wait.

This is the sort of book I would absolutely never be able to write – all those plots and sub-plots and intricate relationships. There are possibly flaws – sometimes the psychology, the motivations, feel a bit stretched. But the characters are so believable, and the setting of time and place is spot on.

Just a few lines, as illustration:
It was a dismal, short and generally unnecessary day. Leaden clouds heavy with rain swept across the city without releasing a drop and occasional gusts of wind tugged at the newspapers in the stand outside Elmer’s Fruit & Tobacco kiosk. Headlines on the newspaper stand implied that people had begun to get sick of the so-called war on terror, which now had the somewhat odious connotation of an election slogan . . .

The translator, Don Bartlett, obviously deserves credit.

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