Critic Reviews

Nesbø realizes the importance of showing all the shading of a character he obviously feels strongly for, and that comes through in the poignant scenes between Harry and his lover’s (Pia Tjelta) son Oleg (Maxime Baune Bochud) who feels a strong connection to Harry. It is those decisions that elevate this series above traditional mystery fare and makes us hope that this team will reunite to adapt more of Nesbø’s addictive novels.

A roundhouse-kick of a thrill ride that lives up to the promises baked into the thriller subgenre's name, Jo Nesbø's Detective Hole delivers virtually everywhere it should — which is nothing less than what a modern legend deserves.

So much plot, so much incident, plus heatwaves, tropical thunder and sweat. As rides go, it’s certainly rollicking. Tracking through grimy urban squalor as well as the beauty of Norwegian landscapes filmed in a golden honey light, it’s a feast for the senses with the smarts of a well-funded action movie.

If “Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole” continues (there’s certainly a wealth of material to be mined from the novels), it could upgrade from good to great if it goes a bit leaner, a bit more focused. All the pieces are in place.

Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole isn’t reinventing the “troubled detective” or Nordic noir genres, but good performances by Santelmann and Kinnaman make the show very watchable.

The twists and turns are frequent, yet impressively the narrative is always relatively easy to follow and grab a hold of. .... The pacing often drags and beats repeat themselves.

After delivering a compelling hook in its opening chapter and leaving viewers with engaging cliffhangers in the first few episodes, the Netflix crime thriller becomes a little too redundant.

If the storytelling were tighter and more successfully focused on its more sociologically provocative elements, Detective Hole could have settled into the overstuffed genre’s top tier rather than taking a place in the acceptable middle.

“Detective Hole” exhibits the genre’s preferences for sadism, sensationalism and crescendoing gore over plausibility. And Hole himself is kind of a drag, a situation that Santelmann (Ragnar the Younger in “The Last Kingdom”) doesn’t do much to alleviate. But the show is conspicuously polished and nice to look at.

The characterisation from Kinnaman and Santelmann is top notch, and the scenes between them are the best thing here, but there is a problem with the drama’s narrative flow.