RaveThe Los Angeles TimesThis is a long novel, heavy with characters, back story and Scandinavian angst, but never feels ponderous. It also manages to keep twisting until the last few pages ... once the novel focuses, about 50 pages in, it never loses its force; the images shift but never blur ... What may be most remarkable is that the alcoholic, sensitive Hole resembles a huge number of post-Raymond Chandler detectives, and Knife – with its wintry landscape and stylish Nordic neighborhoods – has a lot in common with other examples of the genre. And yet, the writing never feels rote, Hole’s inner life is never simple, and the action never becomes predictable. For all the energy and humor in the books, and what at first can seem like extraneous musical references...Nesbo is actually as careful a writer as Hole is a detective ... The novel ends with a fascinating series of shifts and reframings both dramatically satisfying as fiction and – in the real, Norwegian world of crime-fighting in which the novel is set – ethically queasy.
David Sax
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewNo matter which side you’re on in the debate over digital technology, there’s something to cheer you in The Revenge of Analog. If you lament that the online revolution has wiped out the local, the tangible, the brick-and-mortar, David Sax’s chronicle of resurgent vinyl record factories and board-game cafes will reassure you with some of the niche businesses that have survived the digital onslaught. But if you think that Twitter and smartphones have brought us the best of all possible worlds, you’ll enjoy reading that many of these new, in-real-life innovations are actually enlivened by the web, like the blogs dedicated to Moleskine notebooks, which are thriving in an era of print nostalgia.
