The Bat: Read the first thrilling Harry Hole novel from the No.1 Sunday Times bestseller (Harry Hole, 1)

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Harry still doesn't have his act together by the end of the book, but he has managed to think out the solution, which is pretty amazing because he is drunk. You imagine you’ve said something wrong, and it doesn’t occur to you that I’m intelligent enough to take into account that you’re a foreigner.

The fact that Harry Hole is a character in constant development makes the book even more interesting. I’m guessing that most of his (non-Australian) readers won’t have read anything by Indigenous Australians and might think he’s done a good thing. The British and American publishers chose to start by translating the later books, set in Oslo, and only after these became very popular came around to publishing the first book, set in Australia. Harry, in a ridiculous drunken mess, attempts to do more detective work, meeting up with a hooker who knew Andrew and Otto well. 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.Birgitta goes to surprise Harry at his hotel, but finds him a drunken mess with a hooker, things don't go well and there is a large argument. The Bat begins in the most non-Nordic location imaginable, with Harry Hole arriving in Sydney, Australia.

Apparently the early books in the series were only translated later once he had got established but either way it was a good story and is very well written. For me, the biggest insult to Nesbo was to see him advertised as “the next Stieg Larsson” when in fact The Bat was written eight years before The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. 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.We weren't allowed to draw the line ourselves, and with Harry through his drunken stupor, maybe we had some unreliable narrator bits and it was lost. The first thing I learned from the novel was that, in Jo Nesbø’s head, and who am I to doubt that he’s correct, Norwegians and Australians alike are casually racist.