Hole has an awkward encounter with Kensington’s surrogate son, Toowoomba, where he asks what tribe Toowoomba is from. 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. Harry then begins to link the path of the circus with the murders, and sees that they are shockingly close, with a few minor discrepancies. The book throws red herrings at us, and has the lead character Utterly Convinced someone is the killer, only to be proven wrong.

We have a team of four detectives on the case plus high-­priority access to the force’s resources—all the computers, forensic staff, lab people. They know that he and his mother moved to Australia after her divorce, that she sells awful hippy knickknacks, and that Evans White has no alibi for the night of Ingers death. Otto Rechtnagel is a rather flamboyant man who is in a traveling circus that is in town at the time.

Ever since the end of the nineteenth century the politics surrounding Indigenous peoples has been governed by the authorities’ bad conscience about the terrible treatment we’ve received. Throughout the book we begin to get some back story on Harry, including his abstinence from alcohol. The other thing that’s noteworthy about this first novel is that it is not set on Harry’s home turf of Oslo, Norway. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Through Tawoombas phone they track him to the Sidney Aquarium, a chase ensues through aquarium ending with Tawoomba getting shot in the leg and falling into a carnivorous shark tank.

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She lived with her boyfriend in Newtown for a while before they split up and she moved to a little one-­room flat in Glebe. First of all, they take our people’s pride, and when it’s gone they’re scared to death of treading on it. It didn’t make its way to English audiences until 2012, though, by which time later entries in the Harry Hole series had been already published in English. The mystery itself is pretty standard fare, a woman is killed, and slowly we discover she was the latest victim of a serial killer. With special thanks to the person who placed it in the hotel used book library that enabled me to read it while on holiday last week.

Otto, a large masculine man, whom I would love to see in drag, knew Inger well, and quickly comes under suspicion of Harry Hole. 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. So, this book is not Jo Nesbo's best, but it's the first in the Harry Hole series, so I feel it's a must-read.The Bat begins in the most non-Nordic location imaginable, with Harry Hole arriving in Sydney, Australia. That’s all there is to it because the novel unravels the investigation into this death — which, given that this is a Harry Hole novel, could be the work of a serial killer and rapist (who is seemingly into blonde-haired women).