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

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We’ve got the Olympic Games just round the corner, in 2000, and tourism from Scandinavia’s on the up. Otto comes back on stage, the audience is assuaged, but Harry still has a pit in his stomach forming. Harry’s fish-out-of-water experience in a foreign land and the odd-couple pairing with a mismatched partner makes for pleasurable reading all the way to the end. I also learned that Harry Hole is part of the grand tradition of slightly dysfunctional policemen who fall with embarrassing haste for women they have only just met and know nothing about. I am going to read the next book in the series just because I have to see how he survives the situation he has created.

The first bit of the novel is a philosophical travelogue as Hole visits establishments and small towns with connections to the deceased and, to be frank, isn’t given much to do.With a stiff back and jet lag beginning to announce its presence, Harry and his suitcase were now alone on a pavement in a town boasting a population roughly equivalent to the whole of Norway, outside the splendid Crescent Hotel. Harry gets kicked out his hotel, and he drunkenly stumbles, bottle in hand, until he finds a suitable cheap hotel to stay in. Had the weather been a little worse the waves would definitely have carried her out, but instead she lay among the rocks until she was found. 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.

For years, detective Harry Hole has been at the centre of every major criminal investigation in Oslo.We also learn that Harry realized his problems with alcohol while he was drinking on duty, he was drunk his partner was in the car with them, and they sped off to chase a suspect. 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). He and Kensington chase down some leads that take them into the Outback looking for a drug dealer, and we get a fascinating view of the Aboriginal experience from a most unexpected source. Steep stone steps led up to the windblown park that lay high above Watson’s Bay to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the east.