Kind of a weird, confusing story with pacing problems throughout.

Detective Harry Hole (terrible name) gets into trouble when he mistakenly shoots a secret service agent (who was in the wrong, but whatever). He gets moved up into the position of Inspector, for political reasons, where he becomes entangled in a case involving a high-powered weapon bought by a mysterious neo-Nazi that fought on the front lines many years ago.

My main issue with this book is, I'm assuming, what got lost in translation. Everything felt very cold and the characters seemed to not care very much about each other or experience great depth of emotion. There were a few violent moments involving main characters that felt overly harsh in the way that the other characters responded (or didn't), and just one too many things going on in the main plots that made it difficult to keep focus.

Something that made this book difficult to follow was the extraordinarily large web of characters/suspects that interacted with each other in different ways. Many of them had different names depending on which time period we were looking at (multiple personality disorders played a factor), and were entangled with each others' spouses as well. It all became a little confusing, but due to the dull feeling of the main characters and the story in general I found myself kind of ignoring the fact that I was confused and simply reading on.

I think the book really reminds me of a very old, slow detective movie combined with the relationship web of a soap opera. I continuously told myself after only a few pages, "That's a good stopping point", and would have to force myself to pick it back up again.

I hate giving books that have been translated one star, so I gave it two just because Jo Nesbø is so popular and I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that this translation merely didn't do the original justice.