‘Detective Hole’ Review: Jo Nesbø’s Dark Cop Arrives Too Late to the Nordic Noir Boom (Netflix)

In 1997, Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø created what would become his most popular and iconic character: detective Harry Hole (pronounced “HOO-leh”). Across 13 novels, the author—responsible for countless staples of what’s often labeled Nordic noir—built a prototype of the dark, obsessive cop whose traits are by now genre fixtures: an alcoholic prone to violence and depression, a loner with few friends, terse, stubborn, and driven. He’s not exactly likable, but he usually knows what he’s doing and has sharp instincts.

For reasons that are somewhat hard to explain, Nesbø’s novels—not just the Harry Hole series—have rarely been adapted for film or television. This is especially surprising given that his work fits squarely into the kind of police procedurals with complex, morally ambiguous characters that the industry eagerly embraced throughout the 2000s and 2010s. The failure of The Snowman, directed by Tomas Alfredson and starring Michael Fassbender, seemed to shut the door on audiovisual adaptations of his work for good. But that turned out not to be the case. Now comes the first real attempt to translate a substantial portion of the saga into series form—a format far more accommodating to Nesbø’s sprawling plots. The fact that the project is created by Nesbø himself at least guarantees a degree of fidelity to the source. That should be good news.

Detective Hole doesn’t begin at the beginning. Instead, it drops viewers into the world of the Norwegian investigator with the character already fully formed. The season is based on The Devil’s Star (2003), the fifth book in the series, written at a time when the novels were beginning to circulate internationally—a process that would fully take off with The Snowman. To reintroduce Hole, Nesbø revisits key moments from his past: a drunken car chase that ended in a crash and the death of his partner—an event that still haunts him—and a brutal bank robbery in which the perpetrator executes a teller at point-blank range for taking too long, a storyline drawn from Nemesis, the fourth novel.

As the saying goes, everything connects. You can’t really enter Hole’s world without understanding where he stands—or who he’s tied to. Roughly half an episode is devoted to establishing that background. Hole, still obsessed with past cases and their lingering threads, has stopped drinking and is now in a stable relationship with Rakel (Pia Tjelta) and her son Oleg (Maxime Baune Bochud). At the same time, he continues investigating a long-running case involving connections between neo-Nazi groups and arms trafficking. Within that network, he suspects his Swedish colleague Tom Waaler (Joel Kinnaman), who—unsurprisingly, and not exactly hidden by the series—turns out to be as corrupt as he is ruthless beneath his polished exterior.

The season’s central plot kicks in with a double blow near the end of the first episode. While following the arms trafficking lead, Hole’s colleague Ellen (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) discovers Waaler’s involvement. He catches her in a remote cabin, kills her, eliminates his unstable associate Sverre Olsen, and stages the scene to pin everything on him (a sequence handled differently in the novel The Redbreast). For Hole, the impact is devastating: he relapses into alcoholism, shows up to work drunk, and is fired. But just before his departure, a new case emerges—a woman found murdered in a strange manner, marked with a five-pointed star. Then another victim appears. And just like that, the series shifts into familiar serial killer territory.

Published in 2003, The Devil’s Star carries all the hallmarks of the post-Se7en wave: killers acting like biblical poets, cities that resemble hell on earth, tormented protagonists, brooding soundtracks (here enhanced by the presence of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis), and a visual elegance that contrasts with the ugliness depicted. It’s pure David Fincher material. The problem is twofold. First, neither of the directors brought on by Nesbø—Øystein Karlsen and Anna Zackrisson—is Fincher. Second, 2026 is not 2003, 2007 (the era of Zodiac), or even 2010. The “tortured cop hunts apocalyptic serial killer” formula has long since worn thin. Every time the killer’s voiceover drifts into pseudo-biblical musings, the impulse to abandon the series becomes hard to resist.

Still, while the serial killer plotline feels derivative, the conflict between Hole and Waaler—an ongoing thread in the novels—is far more compelling. They operate within the same police force, are occasionally forced to work together, and clearly despise each other, each suspecting—or outright blaming—the other for past crimes. Unlike similar stories, the series makes no effort to conceal Waaler’s nature: from the outset, the audience knows he’s both a brutal murderer and a corrupt cop working both sides of the line. And while Hole is far from a model detective—on the surface, he even appears more disreputable—you inevitably side with him in this clash of bruised egos and Nordic masculinity.

That dynamic is the series’ strongest asset. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite elevate the show beyond a formula that now feels routine: a serial killer targeting naked women, driven by some twisted obsession. It may be time to admit that, despite their early reputation, Nesbø’s novels might not be much more than solid, highly readable bestsellers that haven’t aged particularly well. They lack the broader social ambition found in the work of his late contemporary Stieg Larsson, author of the Millennium trilogy, and their more cluttered, Americanized approach to the genre often leads them into the same pitfalls as many of their counterparts.

To be fair, any of Nesbø’s novels still outclasses the work of Harlan Coben. In that sense, it makes perfect sense for platforms like Netflix to turn to his material—it’s a step up. But don’t expect Detective Hole to emerge as a contemporary classic. This series arrives too late in its own lifecycle. What felt like a compelling trend twenty years ago now plays as a string of familiar tropes—many of them cemented, ironically, by the very streaming platforms now trying to revive them.