Bodies, bodies, everywhere
Jo Nesbo and Don Winslow open the blood-gates with summer thrillers
Jo Nesbo has left a lot of bodies in his wake. Practically a domestic industry in his native Norway, Nesbo has carved a path through the thriller genre with his Harry Hole series (The Leopard, Redbreast, The Snowman) and a growing number of stand-alone novels.
Nesbo’s most recent tales, Blood on Snow, gets right down to the basics.
Blood on Snow is a short, quick burst of nostalgia for summer reading. It features a cast of sketchy archetypes all battling it out in the streets for love, sex and a little bit of heroin. Like many thrillers, this is a fairy tale for adults — instead of kings and princesses, there are mob bosses, femme fatales and hired guns.
The story follows a “fixer” named Olav who has a backstory packed with standard doses of familial abuse, unmitigated trauma and social neglect.
A series of rapid, conventional betrayals is unleashed when he misunderstands the orders of his boss, plunging 1970s Oslo into violence — a world conveniently lacking cellphones, Google searches and Instagram hashtags. Even a travel agent appears occasionally to remind you this all happened a long time ago.
This is an old story Nesbo wants to tell, with a cast including a quasi-incestuous femme fatale, a rival crime boss named the Fisherman and a narrator who has read Les Miserables one too many times. Blood on Snow works best when it embraces its origins as a barebones fable, when all the bodies are falling just fast enough to keep the story moving toward its inevitable conclusion.
Nesbo stumbles when he attempts to reach too far for some character motivation, or reasons beyond the bloody necessity he’s cleverly orchestrated. The dead and the past don’t need to explain the story, not when the thriller tropes are already in play — the hidden love for a grocery clerk saved from prostitution, the giant Russian brought in to clean up Olav’s mess, and all the bodies stacking up on the sidelines, asking you to turn the page.
The fable only falters when it tries to convince you that it’s real.
Don Winslow, on the other hand, isn’t here to tell fables.
Following in the footsteps of his previous classic narco-thrillers like Savages and The Power of the Dog, Winslow’s latest novel The Cartel is a sprawling story encompassing the past decade of Mexican-American drug wars, meticulously researched and dedicated to the hundreds of journalists murdered or “disappeared” during this volatile period.
The story follows a number of narratives, from 11-year-old killers to independent mistresses with their own supply chains, but primarily revolves around Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Art Keller and Adan Barrera, boss of El Federacion, the world’s most powerful cartel. Their dance over 600 pages leaves bodies everywhere and anywhere, until the reader goes numb. Until you can’t keep count anymore.
Winslow had assembled all the nasty and necessary details for his narco-epic — hidden escape tunnels under bathtubs, personal chefs serving steak and lobster in maximum security, broken bodies shoved into fifty gallon drums and set alight.
Savvy readers can follow the events if they’ve been reading the headlines. Winslow has set up a series of funhouse mirrors to bounce back the facts and all the ugly devastation wrought by North America’s unending appetite for whatever will get it high.
Despite an impressive amount of research and its epic scope, The Cartel still readily embraces its old roots in the thriller genre. The old comforts you might find in Michael Connelly or Elmore Leonard are still here.
Art Keller remains a stoic, isolated man throughout his decade long quest, haunted and mocked by his past, unable and unwilling to bide his time or observe any kind of department oversight. He’s a lone wolf cast from a very old mould.
Winslow’s best villains are sketched as hungry and methodical men — Adan Barrera and his final nemesis, Ochoa, head of the feared Zetas, both push past accusations of cliche into new and terrifying shapes. Their war is defined in terms of family, blood, and eventually, unrelenting death.
Winslow’s women are also tough and well-observed, but they’re all beautiful, without exception. Every killer in The Cartel is a good shot, and every error is pre-destined. When the thriller takes on the facts, there are only so many surprises left for the reader — even when logic says a man should die, the genre may perform another miracle to save him. It’s part of the appeal, part of why we keep coming back.
What keeps The Cartel grounded is its bodies, an almost limitless supply of carnage that Winslow cannot avoid. Even as his characters retreat and falter, the reader is forced to press forward, to keep going. Each turn of the page uncovers another corpse, another shallow grave. As Winslow states, “The killing now commands the killing, because no one knows anything else to do.”