Novels No. 20 (LL338)

Jessica Knoll. Bright Young Women. Ebook download from TPL's "Libby." USA: Simon & Schuster, 2023.

When I put a hold on this book, I did not expect such an intimate perspective on the aftermath of an abhorrent crime. In a Florida State University sorority house, Pamela by chance saw the face of the man who brutally committed assault and battery on some of her housemates in the middle of the night. For a brief terrifying second, she thought he was Roger, her good friend Denise's boyfriend. The fact that Pamela mentioned this mistake to the Tallahassee Sheriff's investigators fastened him in their collective mind as the perpetrator, creating a sworn enemy for Pam. The local media pile on as well to excoriate Roger; he was arrested but could not be held for lack of additional evidence.

Two of the young women died, including Denise; the sorority house becomes a busy crime scene. How Pamela fares with the trauma, how her efforts to correct the identification are ignored, how she tries to pull the survivors together as president of the sorority house—are the story's aggregate. Her responsibilities and obligations feel overwhelming. And Roger wants revenge for his character defamation. But the advent of Tina into her life presents a serial killer theory—dismissed by sheriff and company—that only the two women pursue, committed to justice for friends who died. Tina believes her friend Ruth was another unrecognized victim. By the eventual time the Ted Bundy-like killer is caught and goes to trial, Pamela is a newly-minted lawyer who must be a witness.

Author Knoll goes deep into the psyches of both a victim and a survivor, leaving a very powerful impression—the overblown hype surrounding the killer himself, the system's casual disregard for the victims and their families, and the often ineffective voices of women. The prose flows beautifully despite the chronological shifting of the action. A moving story, indeed.

Pamela

▪ "How could one man do what he did to four girls in a twenty-minute span?" (38)

▪ My parents spent a lot of money to neglect me, and I was always fantasizing about something awful happening that would force them to take care of me in ways that money cannot. (40)

▪ Where was everyone's sense of urgency? I felt stark raving mad with urgency. (56)

▪ Roger looked so good for it that I sometimes wanted to believe it. (166)

▪ "What's going on, Carl?" I asked bluntly. "You're avoiding my calls. You stopped answering my letters." (300)

Ruth

▪ My mother always did this. Trapped me in the car with her wishes, her martyrdom. (98)

▪ She was angry with me, but she didn't have any reason to be, meaning she would have to find one. (235)

▪ No one had ever treated me like I was the silver ball of mercury in the thermometer's glass chamber. (256)

▪ It was the laugh of someone who had battled an irrational toddler all day and had lost the will to live. (?xxx)

Others

▪ "He should fry," Carl said, real hatred in his voice, "for what he put her through." (129)

▪ "I'm a licenced therapist," Tina said. "Everything in my toiletry kit is legal." (155)

▪ "You heard his footsteps overhead, and you pursued him. That takes a set of steel, Pamela." (157)

Jo Nesbo. Phantom. 2011. UK: Vintage/Random House, 2012.

Hard to believe that I missed this earlier book by Nesbo. It's the first time Harry Hole returns to Oslo's Crime Squad, sober and cleaned up, after a lengthy alcohol detox in Hong Kong (see No. 4, LL322, Killing Moon, for a later time). Initially more prominent in this story are the thoughts of a dying addict, Gusto Hanssen, age nineteen, the product of a broken home that soon led him into a world of thievery and drug trafficking. Mentally, he's reviewing his short but sordid history as he bleeds out, while other parts of the story move along. And we are introduced to the activities of commercial pilot Tord Schultz who has a regular routine for moving illicit drugs. Harry arrived back in town because his once- foster son Oleg was arrested for Gusto's murder. The evidence looks solid against Oleg, son of Rakel, the estranged love of Harry's life. No one exactly forbids Harry's looking into the allegedly solved murder case.

Word is that Oleg and Gusto had been fast friends. In a junkie squat Harry does find evidence that Oleg was using and dealing drugs, but he won't speak to Harry ‒ or to anyone ‒ resenting Harry's recent long absence in his life. But feelings with Rakel are as strong as ever. Police politics arise again: cryptic Mikael Bellman was promoted to head of Orgkrim, with sleazy cop Truls Berntsen working for him. Harry's helpful friend, Beate, is still in the crime tech lab. The dying man's backstory counterpoints what Harry needs to learn to exonerate Oleg. When Oleg is suddenly released from prison, he and Harry are at the mercy of a powerful drug lord and the collateral effects of a sensational new street drug called "violin." From cemetery to opera house and more, a breathtaking, incredulous chase spins out—the hunt for a desperate, bleeding Harry—by multiple forces.

Harry Hole thrillers are always complicated. This one provides several shocks, the most electric of which left me numb! Each time you think the plot is over ‒ bad guys dealt with, good guys back on track ‒ another stunning moment occurs. Although Nesbo includes more than I want to know about the chemistry of hard drugs (point taken, sir), the damage they do is far more compelling in his articulate descriptions of the young men's moods and actions. If you're a Harry Hole fan, Do. Not. Miss. Phantom.

Bits

▪ "Old enough to kill, old enough to die. In the new year they would have been called up for military service." (42)

▪ "There are just whispers about the man from Dubai. No one has seen him, no one knows his name, he's a kind of invisible puppeteer." (78)

▪ The evidence was unambiguous. And all his years of experience as a murder investigator worked against him: things were surprisingly often exactly as they looked. (137)

▪ "Prison's worse than death, Harry. Death is simple, it liberates the soul. But prison eats away at your soul until there is nothing human left of you. Until you become a phantom." (144)

▪ He would be in Shanghai in eighteen hours. He could be in Shanghai within eighteen hours. (162)

▪ Oleg's pathetic attempt to manipulate him didn't make him angry, it made him want to embrace the boy and hold him tight. (168)

▪ "You have to find out where they've hidden Oleg Fauke." (255)

▪ Mikael Bellman listened without interrupting, even when Harry could see disbelief in his eyes. (284)

▪ "Someone else has confessed to the murder of Gusto Hanssen. Isn't that fantastic, Harry?" (291)

Gusto

▪ For you carried your loneliness like a wet, heavy raincoat, Oleg, you walked with a bent back and shuffled your feet. I had picked you out precisely because of your loneliness. (91-2)

▪ After all, I was better off than Oleg, who'd had to start from scratch selling hash in the frozen hell by the river. (124)

▪ To the nearest round figure, I earned six thousand [kroner] a day. (149)

▪ If there were new goods in town, you went to where the most desperate junkies hung out, the ones willing to test anything so long as it's free, who don't care if it kills them because death is round the corner anyway. (153)

▪ "His parents had given him away. What do you think that does to a boy?" (263)

▪ I had no idea why the old boy had let me get away with stealing the dope, as Oleg and I had done ...

I didn't give a shit, though, I was at the end of my tether, all I heard were the hungry screams of my blood vessels. (393)

Harry

How do you investigate something that is already solved, answer questions that have already found adequate answers? What did he think he could achieve? Defeat the truth by denying it? The way he, in his role as a Crime Squad detective, had seen relatives produce the pathetic refrain: "My son? Not a chance!" He knew why he wanted to investigate crimes. Because it was the only thing he could do. The only thing he had to contribute. He was the housewife who insisted on cooking at her son's wake, the musician who took his instrument to his friend's funeral. The need to do something, as a distraction or a gesture of comfort. (81-2)