The Thirst

Oslo is in a panic. Women are turning up murdered, each one drained of blood and left to rot. With the case going nowhere, the police turn to Harry Hole, a disgraced former commissioner, and bring him back in.

Harry works alongside a team of detectives and an eccentric professor of vampire folklore. Together they try to work out who the killer is and what drives him. The man seems to be after something far darker than a simple victim, and the investigators cannot yet say what it is.

This is the eleventh Harry Hole novel by Jo Nesbø, a crime thriller in the Nordic noir tradition with a streak of horror running underneath. The tone is gritty and tense, and the atmosphere stays heavy from start to finish. The setting is a city on edge, and the police work under that pressure.

As the inquiry deepens, the boundary between fact and folklore begins to blur. Harry has to weigh what the evidence shows against what the old stories about vampires suggest. The case also stops being only a professional matter for him, and the stakes turn personal.