"The Jealousy Man & other stories" by Jo Nesbo (Harvill Secker, 2021)

I got this partly to see how well the thriller genre works in the short story format.

The wikipedia page describes him as "the most successful Norwegian author of all time". As if that wasn't enough, he used to be a professional football player, and for years has been lead singer and songwriter with a group which has sometimes topped the charts. And he was a financial analyst.

The 12 stories average about 40 pages. 2 of the stories are about 100 pages long.

• London - A man (“I”) gets into conversation with a woman (“you”) on a plane. There’s someone else in his mind too – “The scent of your perfume had made me think of her”. Her husband has been unfaithful. She’s paid a company to kill her, making it not look like suicide. They both know some statistics – she says that each person is their own most likely murderer. She’s decided to enjoy her last few days. She offers him sex. She asks if he’s her contract murderer. He says yes, but he’s fallen in love and suggests a way they can evade the company. He tells her his sad life story – his partner killed herself? She falls asleep. He’s poisoned her with an untraceable drug that causes a heart-attack.
• The Jealousy Man - A novella. Nikos Bali, a detective (about 60? His first-person PoV) is flown in from the Greek mainland to assess a missing person case - a brother went on his morning swim and didn't return. The 2 American brothers, tourist climbers, were seen arguing the night before. He interviews Franz, the other brother - an identical twin (we're told this detail 16 pages in!). They'd argued over Helena, a girl Franz had met - Julian had met Helena one night. Nikos is a jealousy specialist. His task is to assess the motive then go home, but the weather's bad. He interviews Helena, who didn't know the men were twins. She'd only fallen in love (had sex) with Julian. Franz disappears. Julian is found tied up. Later Franz's body is found in the sea.
  We learn more about Monique and Nikos when students at Oxford. She introducing him to climbing. His best friend Trevor was a climber. He saw Trevor and Monique once having sex.
  5 years after the murder investigation he returns to the island. Julian and Helena are married with a child. Julian and Nikos go climbing. At one point Nikos's life is in Julian's hands. Nikos confirms Julian's suspicion that Nikos knows he's really Franz. Nikos says that after he discovered Monique's infidelity the 3 of them went climbing. He did a dangerous climb, boobytrapped the route then dared embarrassed Trevor to do it. Trevor died. Niko and Monique lost touch with each other. Nikos hadn't pursued Julian's crime (though he had evidence) because he saw similarities between the 2 of them. He was interested in seeing if Julian could both have the girl and cope with the guilt. Julian suspects that Helena knows. Nikos suspects that Monique knows. Julian lets Nikos live.
  3 months later, Nikos gets a letter from Monique, saying she's a widow and would like to meet him again. He thinks he'll agree.
  Nikos's Icarus fixation, his family circumstances, and Victoria aren't well integrated with the main plot. Neat central idea.
• The Line - 5 pages. The narrator's 39, female, coloured. She works in a 7-eleven shop. She poisons a boy who barges into the queue.
• Trash - Ivar, a refuse collector in Oslo, has anger management issues and doesn't recall what happened the night before. He fears he may have attacked his wife for being unfaithful. His colleague used to be a psychologist in Latvia but had to immigrate fast because he slept with married patients. When Ivar empties a particular bin he remembers that he'd left a body in there the night before. He'd killed the man who'd been chatting up his wife in a way that means he won't be discovered.
• The Confession - While he's with an officer being questioned in Simone's flat, his wife Simone dead. She died of cyanide poisoning. She was rich, he was a budding photographer. He'd gone bust and they separated. She'd soon found a new man, an architect, Henrik. Henrik had asked him for a chat. He'd had doubts about her loyalty, and didn't expect to marry her. Arne and Simone's divorce papers hadn't come through. He tells the silent policeman that he laced her favourite sweets with cyanide and put them in Henrik's shopping bag. He'd hoped to frame Henrik and be left with Simone's money, but the police hadn't analysed the sweets and had thought it was suicide. Arne's been eating the sweets.
• Odd - Odd Rimmer, an author, suddenly avoids interviews. He doesn't want he writing to be sullied by marketing. Interest in him grows. He turned down a film. He sees Esther (an interviewer he let down at the last moment) with her boyfriend Ryan. Esther starts living with Rimmer. It disrupts his writing. She leaves. He finishes a masterpiece. Ryan breaks in with a gun. Rimmer kills him - he's unsure if it was self-defence. He makes it look like suicide, hiding the gun in the cellar. He finds that the public have lost interest in him - he's been silent too long. Esther is pregnant. He shoots himself, knowing that Gore Vidal called death a good career move. After, he imagines the interview with Esther that he never had.
• The Earring - Amund's a taxi driver living with Wenche. A customer finds an earring. It looks like Wenche's. He suspects the taxi's other driver (and his boss) Palle has been with Wenche's. After telling Palle about the earring, a woman phones to say it's hers. Amund realises that the earring wasn't hers, she's been employed by Palle to fool him. He takes the brake fluid out of the taxi Palle will soon be driving.
• Rat Island - 100+ pages. The narrator, Will, is on the roof of a 90 storey block waiting to be picked up by helicopter and taken to an aircraft carrier where 3,500 people will try to isolate themselves from post-pandemic anarchy. His wife is Heidi. They had a teenage daughter Amy and Sam (4). His rich ex-boss Colin is on the roof too. His wife is Liza. Their daughter Beth is 17. Their son Brad has rebelled and was in a gang of looters. There's another narrator, Yvonne, a motorcycling girl in Brad's gang. We learn what led up to the rooftop scene.
  Brad's gang broke into Will's home, raped Heidi and kidnapped Amy, later killing her. Will kidnapped Brad, keeping him in Will well protected house, planning to take him to court to show him how people should behave. Colin offered Will 3 aircraft carrier tickets in return for Brad. Will pays Yvonne to collect Brad and return him to his gang. Brad's not reformed. As Will expected, Brad plans to destroy Will and his house, exploiting a weakness that Will pointed out to him.
  
Back on the rooftop, Will, Heidi and Sam are collected and reach the aircraft carrier. Colin and his family are going to take over Will's house.
Loyalty and revenge between fathers and childen.
• The Shredder - Ralph survives an STD epidemic a century after HIV. While researching for a cure he thinks he's discovered an anti-aging drug. His company send him and a team to Morocco to secretly develop it. After, most of the researchers undergo memory-shredding so that they forget what they've done. In Paris there's a heavily guarded Exor device that can extract memories even from dead brain parts. When Ralph was 50 he married his brother's widow Klara. She was diagnosed with premature aging so he used her to test the drug. It stopped aging but also caused mood swings - mostly aggression. Ralph thinks that even were the drug successful, it would present mankind with too many problems. The company threatens to kill his wife if he doesn't give them the formula. He hides her in a Swiss clinic. His closest associate threatens to sell the formula to the Chinese. Ralph kills him, keeping the head, getting maggots to eat the brain. He uses the shredder so that he forgets all about Klara and the drug.
• The Cicadas - Martin (first-person PoV, 25, artist) and Peter (scientist - parallel universes; rich) are by the sea at San Sebastian when Martin saves a girl, Miriam. He has a deja-vu feeling. Peter cheekily goes out with her. They move on to Pamplona to run with the bulls. They read that there's been a murder in San Sebastian. Martin returns without telling Peter, thinking he might have evidence. The police show him the corpse (later we learn it's Peter). He meets the girl. She says that she was bride-kidnapped in Krgyzstan 3 months before by a Mafia family, escaping on wedding night and fleeing to Istanbul with her mother. She says that she thinks Robert has killed someone and that she has too - her husband. She's on the run. At the beach she'd been trying to fake her suicide. Martin returns to Pamplona. During the bull run Peter trips him and saves him. Peter explains that in the future he works out how to travel between parallel worlds. A version of himself had come to this universe, killing the Peter of this universe to give himself a better chance of having Miriam, though he knows that Martin and Miriam are made for each other. There are 3 Peters. Next morning Peter is found dead. At the end Martin watches Miriam fake her suicide. They'll meet up later and start a new life together.
  My favourite piece.
• The Antidote - After 30 unhappy but profitable years as a publisher, Emerson sold up and divorced, buying a snake farm in Botswana. His drugged son Ken gambled as an Oxford student. At 27 he owed £1 million. He goes to Botswana to kill his father (thus inheriting his money), who invited him over so that they could get to know each other better. On a snake hunt they both get bitten. Ken sees this as a chance to avoid needing to shoot his father, but he injects them with the wrong antidotes and kills only himself.
• Black Knight - Dr Meyer (his first-person PoV) is a psychologist/hypnotist in near-future Milan - a front for being a contract killer. His young son died and his wife suicided. He's taken Judith (agent, lover) from Gio Greco, a competitor. Greco enacts a cunning trap that Meyer knowing falls into, involving a young boy as bait. Meyer manages to get the boy out of the room they're trapped in, knowing that Gio Greco will recapture him. But Meyer has taught the boy as way to kill Gio Greco. However, Judith is killed.
  Some neat touches - e.g. he says at the start that children and animals are the hardest to hypnotise. In the story he hypnotises both.

Characters often have psychology theories.

Other reviews

• Ray Palen
• readbydusk (I found many of the stories repetitive because they are mostly about men being obsessed with women. ... There’s plenty of philosophical musings that can be a turnoff for some readers but for the most part, I did enjoy it. Here are my favourite stories from the book – The Jealousy Man ... The Line ... Rat Island ... The Cicadas ... Black Knight)