Headhunters

Starred review from August 8, 2011
Nesbø takes a break from his Harry Hole detective series (The Snowman, etc.) with this stellar stand-alone caper. Roger Brown, a British ex-pat comfortably ensconced in Oslo, has developed a reputation as one of the best corporate headhunters in the business, but money problems lead him to use information he gleans from job applicants about valuable art they own. Brown arranges to steal their art works and replace them with clever fakes. When Clas Greve, the former CEO of a major European GPS company, lets slip that he accidentally discovered a long-lost Rubens painting in the apartment he inherited from his aunt, Brown anticipates making his biggest score. Of course, the heist doesn’t go smoothly, and the dizzying reversals of fortune and situations that would be over-the-top in lesser hands make for a delightful roller-coaster ride. Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard fans will be delighted.

September 1, 2011
Nesb's Harry Hole series, starring the troubled Oslo police detective, vaulted the author to the Scandinavian crime-fiction A-list. Now he tries something completely different: a twisty, plot-driven Hitchcockian thriller starring an Oslo headhunter, Roger Brown, legendary in the city's high-end business world for never recommending an executive who wasn't hired. But behind the image, Roger has deep trouble: in order to keep his art-gallery-owner wife, Diana, in the luxurious lifestyle he feels she deserves, he moonlights as an art thief, stealing paintings from the candidates he interviews. That's fine, except he may now have met his match: the former chief executive of a GPS manufacturer, who claims to own a long-missing Rubensand who may also be sleeping with Roger's wife. Nothing is as it seems in this deliciously plotted thriller, and as the tale unwinds, Nesb delivers one shock after the other, culminating with a doozy of a switcheroo at the finish. It's gripping reading, but Nesb's fans may be a bit disappointed: the story, while intricate and involving, lacks the multitextured richness of the Harry Hole novels, and Roger is a far less sympathetic hero than Harry.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)