Harry Hole has decided to die. Take your life to copy whiskeys. After the loss of his wife and his one-time best friend, the Norwegian detective has moved to Los Angeles, where he has been leaning on the bar of a bar waiting for the end to come.
While in Oslo a serial killer is on the loose. He kills young women and drains their brains. The police have a suspect, Markus Røed, a nasty cocaine-addicted millionaire. Røed wants to prove his innocence and hires Hole to discover the real murderer.
The most logical thing would be for Harry not to accept the assignment, since he no longer cares about anything, but suddenly life gives him a second chance. His second chance is a woman, Lucille, an actress of a certain age whose star faded long ago and as drunk as Harry himself.
“Lucille becomes a kind of mother to Harry. She is in danger because she owes a lot of money to a Mexican cartel and Hole decides to save her. So he becomes a private detective to pay the debt of the actress with his fees. Lucille becomes the second chance for Harry, the reason for continuing to live”, as Jo Nesbø, author of Eclipsi ( Proa / Roja
Harry returns to Oslo to catch the killer and from there the reader is the one who is trapped and can no longer let Eclipsi go. It turns out that the criminal is a mastermind who commits his murders with the help of parasites. Likewise. Nesbo delved into “the study of hosts and parasites in the animal world, mice that are sexually attracted to cats and let themselves be taken without complaint” to write Eclipsi.
“With some friends we debated which is the most extravagant parasite in nature. It is Cymothoa exigua, which attaches itself to the tongue of a fish and sucks its blood until the tongue eventually corrodes and detaches, attaches itself to the stump of the tongue, licks more blood, grows and it becomes a new language with its own eyes. They also call it the louse of the flute fish”, explains the writer, who then asks: “Who is the parasite and who is the host in human relationships? This is the theme of the novel, since nature is the best storyteller”.
Stories not without violence, because the serial killer is given time to load a few before Harry discovers him and he doesn’t exactly do it with caresses. “The violence in my books has been criticized a lot, but I wouldn’t say that there is more in Eclipsi than in others, there is simply violence when it serves to move the story and never in a gratuitous way”. points out the writer, who has passed through Barcelona to present the book.
But there is much more to Nesbø’s novels than violence. His plots are also driven by the characters, the intrigue and the originality of the approaches: “We consume many more books, films and series than our grandparents and this forces writers to design more original stories, to think more about them. The bar needs to be raised, because readers are not smarter than in the past, but they are exposed to more stories”, concludes the author who has raised the bar a lot this time, although he may drop it very soon because, as he announces, “we are close to the end of Harry Hole”. Don’t worry fans, because there will be at least one new installment.
