Otto seemingly gets his head chopped off, the audience screams in panic, and since Otto is dressed a blonde Scandinavian woman, Harry panics as well. The book throws red herrings at us, and has the lead character Utterly Convinced someone is the killer, only to be proven wrong.

Behind him in the queue he heard the faint drone of a Walkman and realized it was his traveling companion from the plane. Lots of trying to get to a certain place in time that I think was supposed to feel tense and exciting but instead was pure nonsense. He's an international number one bestseller and his books are published in 50 languages, selling over 33 million copies around the world. As it turns out Evans White is a small time drug pusher who lives in a different part of Australia, which takes Andrew and Harry a considerable amount of time to travel to.

Hole has an awkward encounter with Kensington’s surrogate son, Toowoomba, where he asks what tribe Toowoomba is from. Had trouble getting into it at first but the book lends so much to understanding Harry and how he transforms through the years.

Some strange things happen, Harry in an attempt to gather more information on Evans questions some drug dealers, who beat the hell out of him, only to be saved by Andrew Kensington stepping in. It starts when the Indigenous police officer Andrew Kensington painstakingly explains Aboriginal culture to Hole.I was irritated by Nesbø’s smugness in having police officers explain repeatedly to each other that real life policing isn’t like the policing found in crime novels. This is also a novel that falls into a lot of the common holes of a hardboiled detective, but the lead character seems to be able to act without consequences for himself, which is frustrating. There’s a hint of Nesbø twisting the corner of a handkerchief about it, hoping he’s hit the balance between showing that he’s empathetic with Indigenous people and showing that he’s self-aware enough to recognise his own whiteness. With the bread crumbs you could pick up, instead of chunks of bread flying at you like in this book. When the team unearths a string of unsolved murders and disappearances, nothing will stop Harry from finding out the truth.

When Harry and Andrew travel to investigate Evans, whom Harry is convinced must be the murderer, they find little information about the small times drug dealer. At first I thought it was a young adult mystery because the sentence structure was so basic and simple. Since the book was translated into English in England, American readers may find the prose a bit awkward in spots. Celebrated American author of detective fiction Raymond Chandler once said, “The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.Also, the characters are generally well-developed, and it’s nice to see a queer character or two that isn’t entirely stereotypical show up in a book that’s now some 25 years old. He was on the point of grabbing a taxi when a black man wearing light blue jeans and a Hawaiian shirt, and with an unusually broad nose and dark, curly hair plowed a furrow between the signs and came striding ­toward him. What you’re gonna do is watch carefully while we haul the bastard in, tell the Norwegian press along the way what a wonderful job we’re doing together—making sure we don’t offend anyone at the Norwegian Embassy, or relatives—and otherwise enjoy a break and send a card or two to your dear Chief Constable. I seriously wonder if it had been the first book translated into English would the series be so popular. They topped the charts in Norway, but Nesbo continued working as a financial analyst, crunching numbers during the day and gigging at night.

I certainly think the novel does a little bit of romanticizing alcoholism — even as it paints its ugly side — as Harry is ineffectual until he takes his first drink post-recovery. They need to ask each other stupid questions about how they do their own jobs so that Nesbø can show off to his readers that real police officers don’t behave like that. Through Birgitta we get more of Harry's back story, which, having been following Harry, we learn he was an alcoholic. The passport official looked up from the special visa and studied him, but the pursed mouth was gone.The Bat is a worthy introduction to Scandinavian noir for the uninitiated, even if this first Harry Hole novel is set in Australia. It’s a brave man who takes on another country’s history/ relationship with its first nations’ people. He drove Harry to King’s Cross, holding forth the whole way: this area was Sydney’s red-­light district and the center for the drugs trade and to a large extent all the other shady dealings in town. However, I’ve also read that Nesbø was touring the country with his rock band when he wrote the book, so he may have also been just charmed by the locale.