C'est la vie!!

             It has been a while since I got my hands on a crime fiction novel. Hence when I received Jo Nesbo's "The Leopard" as a Christmas gift I was all eager to devour its contents. I did a quick search on Jo Nesbo and realised that quite a few people had compared him to Steig Larsson and that got me even more curious. I completely loved the narration of "The Girl with the Dragon tattoo" and hence wanted to read this book to compare Jo NEsbo's style of writing with that of Steig's
             The book introduces us to Harry Hole , an Oslo based detective who has received acclaim for cracking previous mysteries especially that of a certain "Snowman". Typical of most deetctives , Hole comes with his own share of person emotional baggage - a down syndrome affected sis , a dying father , a cyanical attitude and the works. He is called to Norway by the Crime Investigation team to investigate a series of serial killings. The murders are quite gory and ruthless and have just one common clue - that the victims stayed in a particular ski cabin resort on the day and time. The rest of the story is about how Harry Hole along with his aide Kaja Solness uncovers the mystery and the killer
                I would not term it entirely fast paced. Spanning over 600 odd pages this book does have some dull moments. Also I felt that there were various characters being introduced throughout the narration that it kept getting difficult to keep track of them (and all of them having hard to pronounce Norwegian names didn't help either). The way he solves the mystery with minimal clues is laudable however I feel there are better crime fiction novels
               I happened to read that "The Snowman" by the same author is a better mystery. Will get my hands on that and post a review soon. To sum it all up "The Leopard" is a mediocre crime fiction novel with a little circuitous plot that can leave you baffled and impatient at times