Down for the body count

Blood on Snow

Jo Nesbø Trans. Neil Smith Random House Canada

208 pp; $28

The Cartel Don Winslow Alfred A. Knopf

616 pp; $33

Jo Nesbø has left a lot of bodies in his wake. Practically a domestic industry in his native Norway, Nesbø 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. Nesbø’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; an exercise in genre with 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 Nesbø 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 Misérables one too many times. Blood on Snow works best when it embraces its origins as a bare-bones fable, when all the bodies are falling just fast enough to keep the story moving toward its inevitable conclusion.

Nesbø 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, is not here to tell fables.

Following in the footsteps of his previous classic narcothrillers like Savages and The Power of the Dog, Winslow’s latest novel, The Cartel, is a sprawling story encompassing the past decade of MexicanAmerican 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 DEA agent Art Keller and Adán Barrera, boss of El Federación, the world’s most powerful cartel. Their dance over six hundred 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 is a lone wolf cast from a very old mould.

Winslow’s best villains are sketched as hungry and methodical men — Adán Barrera and his final nemesis, Ochoa, head of the feared Zetas, both push past accusations of cliché into new and terrifying shapes. Their war is defined in terms of family, blood and, eventually, unrelenting death.

The supporting cast, however, remain locked inside convention. The resentful, untested son of a dead cartel leader, the coke-addicted triggerman, the corrupt cop with a history of abusing women. They all play their parts when called upon, drawing close to the fabled archetypes Nesbø deftly recreates in colder climates. These are the characters you can find on any shelf at home.

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.”

The traditional thriller only needs as many bodies as its plot requires, set up like waystations through a desert. Each one provides just enough fuel to reach the next. Bound by trope and tradition, Nesbø’s Blood on Snow efficiently and expertly uses all of it, wringing out the final drops to reach some sort of finale he can justify, the blood pooling like a “king’s robe” in the snow, a Norwegian folk tale writ large. A thriller ends with that release — a final stop once the fuel is gone.

With his epic, Winslow pushes your head down into the mess he’s made. No fables, but chalked outlines where they used to be. The men are still lonely, bitter and violent. The women are still beautiful and conniving, but you can smell something rotting underneath the prose. A necessary reminder lodged in your summer reading, sent from 50 gallon drums buried under a concrete patio somewhere — a sweet, sickly stench.

More bodies. There are always more bodies. Even the true stories need fuel.