Cockroaches

A novel in Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole series, this crime thriller follows the troubled Norwegian detective to Bangkok, where he is tasked with quietly solving the murder of a diplomat while powerful forces work to ensure he fails.

The story opens in Bangkok, where a Thai sex worker named Dim arrives at the Olympussy motel to meet a client arranged through Wang Lee, the motel's owner and pimp. She finds the man face-down on the bed with an ornate knife protruding from his back. In Oslo, Dagfinn Torhus, a Director at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, receives a top-secret message: Norway's ambassador to Thailand, Atle Molnes, has been found stabbed to death in a Bangkok brothel. An emergency meeting convenes with Secretary of State Bjørn Askildsen, the Police Commissioner, and Bjarne Møller, the newly appointed head of Crime Squad. Molnes was a close friend and party ally of the Prime Minister, a Christian Democrat appointed ambassador as a political favor. If the brothel circumstances become public, the scandal could destroy trust in the government. They decide to send a single detective and settle on Harry Hole, who earned acclaim solving a murder case in Sydney the previous year.

Two officers find Harry at Schrøder's, a decrepit Oslo bar where he sits alone drinking heavily. He is tall and lean, in his mid-thirties, visibly in a downward spiral. When one officer brings up a past incident in which Harry drunkenly drove a car and a colleague was critically injured, Harry punches him and leaves. At home, he is haunted by his sister Sis's unsolved rape case, which was closed after investigators suggested she fabricated the assault. When Møller offers the Bangkok assignment, Harry bargains: He will go if Møller later provides resources to reopen Sis's case. Before departing, he visits Sis in her sheltered housing. She has Down's syndrome and has grown withdrawn since the assault. At the airport, Torhus warns him to maintain absolute discretion.

In Bangkok, Harry meets Inspector Liz Crumley, the American-born head of Homicide, a blunt and formidable woman who immediately calls him out for being visibly intoxicated. His team includes Nho, a young and perceptive officer; Sunthorn, a quiet detective; and Rangsan, the most senior member. At the crime scene, Harry establishes that the ambassador was stabbed while standing and notes a grey grease coating the knife wound. In the ambassador's Mercedes, he finds gambling coupons. In the car's boot, a locked briefcase contains photographs of a child being sexually abused, his first encounter with a pedophilia angle that proves central to the case.

Harry interviews the Norwegian community in Bangkok. The motel owner confirms the ambassador arrived alone and left his door unlocked. At the embassy, the ambitious chargé d'affaires Tonje Wiig reports the ambassador's mobile phone is missing. Harry visits the ambassador's wife, Hilde Molnes, who has a serious drinking problem, and glimpses their teenage daughter Runa, a striking girl with a withered right arm she conceals with a prosthesis. Phone records show the ambassador called a betting service, the embassy, a wealthy Norwegian named Ove Klipra, and currency broker Jens Brekke on the day of the murder. The chauffeur, Sanphet, reveals that Molnes had severe gambling debts owed to loan sharks. Investigation of the knife grease reveals it is reindeer fat, used by the Sami people of northern Norway to protect blades, suggesting the killer may be Norwegian.

Brekke, a charismatic young broker at Barclays Thailand, claims the ambassador visited to discuss an investment and that he accompanied him to the underground car park afterward. He plays a tamper-proof recording of their phone call as proof. Harry grows closer to Runa, who reveals that her father was gay and that it was her mother and Brekke, her mother's lover, who frequented a local hotel for assignations. Harry forces Torhus to explain the full political backstory: Molnes was sent to Bangkok to prevent press scrutiny of his homosexuality, which was incompatible with Christian Democrat values. With the ambassador dead, Hilde gains control of the substantial Molnes family fortune, giving both her and Brekke a potential motive.

Harry discovers that CCTV recordings from Brekke's office car park have been tampered with to erase footage from the murder day. The car park attendant, Jim Love, is found dead in a flophouse, poisoned by prussic acid applied to his opium. Meanwhile, a break-in at the apartment of Ivar Løken, a mysterious ex-military man attached to the embassy, reveals a darkroom full of child abuse photographs. Løken explains that he is conducting an unofficial, government-sanctioned surveillance operation against a Norwegian pedophile in Bangkok, and the ambassador initiated the investigation. Løken also reveals that Torhus and the Police Commissioner knew from the start that the likely killer was Klipra, who lives in a converted Burmese temple. Harry was chosen for the assignment because they expected him to fail.

Harry and Løken break into Klipra's house and find the second of a pair of ornate Shan knives, Burmese temple blades matching the knife found in the ambassador's body. They also find a recording device identical to Brekke's. When Runa is kidnapped and a threatening letter arrives, the team locates Klipra's rural hideaway. Inside, they find both Runa and Klipra dead in an apparent murder-suicide. The case is officially closed.

Harry is not satisfied. Returning to the scene alone, he discovers forensic inconsistencies: there is almost no blood at Klipra's position on the floor despite evidence he was standing when shot, and the vacuum cleaner was stored improperly, as if someone unfamiliar with the cabin had cleaned up. Forensics confirms that plaster from Klipra's hallway matches plaster on a screwdriver in the ambassador's car, and that the vacuum bag holds fibers from the car boot and both dead men's clothing. A sound expert determines that Brekke's alibi call to his sister was made from Klipra's house, not from his own office.

Harry reconstructs the full sequence for Liz: Brekke stabbed the ambassador with a Sami knife in the car park, drove to Klipra's house and shot him, then staged the ambassador's body at the motel with the Shan knife inserted into the pre-existing wound. He stored Klipra's body in the cabin freezer, later kidnapped and killed Runa to frame Klipra, and fabricated his alibi. The motive is financial. With the ambassador and Runa dead, the terminally ill Hilde inherits the Molnes fortune. Since she is marrying Brekke, he stands to inherit everything. He has already invested the anticipated windfall through a shell company registered in Hilde's maiden name reversed.

When Løken fails to appear at their meeting, Harry realizes Brekke has captured him. Brekke calls to taunt Harry, and his enforcer Woo attacks Liz at their meeting place. In the struggle, Liz shoots Woo dead. She then fires on Brekke, wounding him in the stomach, and he flees. Harry chases Brekke onto an unfinished elevated highway above Bangkok. Brekke tries to shoot Harry but discovers the revolver is empty. When Brekke attacks with the Sami knife and drives it through Harry's palm, Harry seizes a pneumatic drill from a nearby toolbox and subdues him. Police arrive on the scene.

In the epilogue, Liz recovers in the hospital. Harry learns from Møller that Brekke had nothing to do with Sis's rape, eliminating the last thread he hoped might connect the cases. Liz asks Harry to promise he will not lose himself. He promises without conviction. In the final scene, Harry lies on a bamboo mat in an opium den. He hallucinates the dead: Løken, Jim Love, and Hilde, who has since died of her terminal illness. At last Runa appears, diving from a board, arcing through the air, breaking the water's surface and disappearing. Then, from the stillness, he hears the soft splashes of swimming strokes.