The Bat

⚖The case for it

Harry Hole arrives in Sydney to investigate a murder. The first entry in the series that made Nesbo Scandinavia's reigning crime writer.

— the canon

✕The case against

Sydney, not Oslo: Harry's first outing strands him in a tourist's Australia, where local characters queue up to deliver lectures on Aboriginal mythology while the serial-killer plot lurches from coincidence to convenience. Everything that makes the later books work, the Oslo texture, the institutional grind, does not exist yet. Apprentice work that fame later dragged into English.

— the honest librarian