BLOOD ON SNOW Another Jo Nesbo Crime Winner

Blood On Snow by Jo Nesbo is a new Crime novel from the Norwegian writer who has become one of the best in the genre. Nesbo is the author of the popular series featuring Oslo police detective Harry Hole.

Blood On Snow is a short, stand-alone novel whose main character, Olav, is a "fixer," a contract killer for his boss. But when his boss, Hoffmann, assigns Olav to kill Hoffmann's wife, Corina, it suddenly creates a dilemma for Olav.

While watching Corina, Olav first learns that she is having an extramarital affair. Then the longer Olav watches her life, the more he begins to fall for Corina himself.

Olav is a practical, uncomplicated man with no illusions about the hit man work that he gets paid to do. He is even philosophical about his role saying, "I was someone's destiny." When he closes in on a victim, he has "a feeling of order, of things falling into place."

But in the situation with Corina, Olav takes an atypical action that alters the sense of order he works by and may cost him his life as a result.

Blood On Snow is a gripping crime tale that races to a harsh finish. It's another satisfying winner for Jo Nesbo.

BEACH RATING: 4 Palm Trees

PERFIDIA by James Ellroy a Lurid Noir Crime Epic

Perfidia by James Ellroy is a lurid, sprawling juggernaut of a crime novel that pre-dates Ellroy's famed Black Dahlia-L.A. Confidential noir trilogy of Los Angeles in the late 1940s to mid 1950s.

This new novel begins in late 1941, just before the Pearl harbor bombing by Japan. The looming war and anti-Japanese fever serves as a backdrop to a politically hot murder case: the gruesome deaths of a local Japanese family by unknown killers.

Ellroy brings back familiar characters from his earlier L.A. novels. Captain William Parker, a morally ambivalent figure, later to become LAPD Chief. Detective Dudley Smith, the brutal, corrupt leader of an in-house police strong-arm squad. New character Hideo Ashida, a Japanese LAPD criminologist, is torn by internal conflicts as he works the murder case of the Japanese family.

Perfidia portrays an LAPD awash in corruption, dirty politics, and off-the-books cop beat-downs. The police are at their dirtiest during the cruel, indiscriminate roundups of local Japanese-Americans for internment as war breaks out. Captain Parker and Dudley Smith use all of it to pursue their own private agendas within the LAPD, and against each other.

Perfidia is an epic read, written in the author's trademark machine-gun style -- raunchy, driven, at times near-manic. The novel is salted with sleazy Hollywood dirt and scenes of raw, broken-teeth violence.

Crime fiction readers should find this one compelling and sure to be on the Best-of-2014 list.

BEACH RATING: 4 Palm Trees