A (faint) silver lining to a miserable day in 2 ERs was that I read the last 200 pages of this book.
This is the second of a series of books by Nesbo featuring Harry Hole, a Norwegian detective with a severe substance dependency problem. It is the first Nesbo book I have ever read and I was pretty favorably impressed. I will read more if they come my way.
In this book Hole is tapped to investigate, pretty much by himself and very much on the DL, the murder of the Norwegian ambassador to Thailand who was found with a knife in his back in a seedy Bankok brothel. This seemingly senseless murder takes Hole down (dare I say it?) a rabbithole of perversion and corruption. The plot has more than the usual number of twists and turns and the body count climbs as the story progresses. But the plot is plausible and the denouement is quite satisfying.
My one complaint is that Nesbo is fond of long, complex dialog where he fails to note who is saying what. I often had to go back to the start of the sequence and carefully re-read it to get a full understanding.
7 out of 10.