In two noir novels, crime lurks beneath small town life in Norway and New England
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Today we're digging into the deep, dark underbelly of humanity with two noir crime books. In a bit, we'll hear from a writer who has to pull off the impossible, which is write a likable mass murderer.

But first, The Oligarch's Daughter is a new thriller from writer Joseph Finder, and it's one of those plotty, propulsive books that you kind of need a pen and paper to keep track of all the double-crossing and hidden identities. Finder spoke with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about how difficult it is to write a thriller set in the modern day with all the surveillance technology that we have now and still have a main character who is skilled enough to disappear. That's ahead.

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The opening pages of the novel The Oligarch's Daughter introduce us to a man named Grant Anderson. He builds boats in New England. It is early morning. He is preparing to take a new client out on a fishing charter. The man arrives at the dock, and Grant Anderson detects a whiff of a Slavic accent. He says,

which makes his stomach turn. Turns out boatbuilder Grant Anderson is not the man he claims to be. He is in hiding on the run from Russians who want him dead, and his client is actually a hitman there to kill him. Joseph Fender is the author of this cat and mouse tale, and he's here with me now. Joseph Fender, welcome. Thank you. Great to be here. Introduce us a bit more fully to Grant Anderson. Without revealing too much, how does he wind up in this mess?

Well, Grant, I guess I can reveal, is actually Paul. And Paul is a guy who is on the run from a Russian oligarch and his bad guys. And he's gone into hiding in a small town in New Hampshire where he's lived for five years. And Grant has set up a new life for himself there.

All cash, in which he is building boats and takes payment in cash only. He doesn't want to leave a trace or record anywhere because he is not actually Grant Anderson. He is a guy named Paul Brightman. Well, let's go to the Paul side of the story and to the title of the book, The Oligarch's Daughter. The Oligarch's Daughter is one Tatiana Belkin. What is her story?

Well, Paul meets Tatiana at a fundraiser in New York and they immediately hit it off. They both decide to leave the fundraiser early and he thought that she was working there and she turns out to be a guest the way he is a guest. And they start dating. They really, really fall for each other.

Tatiana does not reveal to Paul for months who she really is. She's living in an artist's studio apartment in New York, and he just thinks she's a photographer. And only later does he learn that her father is a billionaire oligarch, and he becomes friendly with the father and with the family.

And Paul realizes that he really likes Russian culture. He really likes the Russian family that he's getting closer and closer to.

You also remind us that when it comes to Russian oligarchs, there's rich and then there's oligarch rich. Tell us a little bit about how you made that distinct in the book. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I won't say I talk to oligarchs because nobody would self-identify as an oligarch. But the oligarchs in Russia today, they're not rulers. They have made a deal with Putin to

to keep their fortune and stay out of politics. So this guy, Arkady, is a billionaire who runs a sort of hedge fund in New York and wants Paul to work for him. Arkady is a kind of a charming, jovial, lovable guy, and at the same time, he's quite sinister. And Paul doesn't know what to make of him until the FBI comes up to Paul

And tells them they want him to inform on his father-in-law. And Paul, of course, refuses that. He doesn't want to be unfaithful to his wife. They get married, obviously. And he doesn't want to be disloyal to his father-in-law.

And he's terrified. And he's doing all this while eating the finest caviar and sipping Dom Perignon on yachts. I'm so hoping, Joseph Fender, you will tell me that you got to go out sailing around with rich Russians on their yachts in the name of research. You know, I didn't sail on yachts with rich Russians. What I did was I tracked down the captain of a super yacht.

who is often hired by oligarchs to captain their yachts. And I was able to get all kinds of great detail from this guy, including, for instance, the fact that one of the oligarchs he worked for had a custom-made submarine inside his yacht that he would take out his guests on. So I thought, this is a detail I've got to use.

Too good to be true. It sounds so Bond villain. This is real? Yep. Yep. It is real. It is real. But, you know, what's interesting about these oligarchs is that they are billionaires. They own sports teams. They are also patrons of the art in the U.S. They are sort of, I call them the new Medicis. And they are and were, I should say,

princes of the realm, princes of capitalism in a sense, until the war in Ukraine began. And then they were a persona non grata. Overnight, they were forced out of the country. And this transformation going from being somebody that you wanted on the board of your museum or your hospital or your university to someone who you wouldn't acknowledge was to me humanly fascinating. And it made this an interesting story to tell.

One challenge you had to grapple with that I imagine is new from when you were first writing about Russia is how a person like Grant Anderson can disappear in the digital age with cameras everywhere, facial recognition everywhere. How did you solve that? Exactly. I read a number of books on how to disappear. There's a lot of them. Most of them aren't very good. But I talked to one particular expert who

And he told me that the secret these days is to find a small town where they don't have CCTV cameras and to live a life based on cash. Do not open a bank account. Or if you open a bank account, don't earn any interest. And there's all kinds of things you can't do. So you don't have to report for taxes? Exactly. You do not want the IRS tracking you down. They will find out who you really are.

So it's a real challenge these days. It's not like the old days and early thrillers I used to read where you could just disappear by forging a passport. It doesn't work that way anymore. It's much, much more difficult. One last character I have to ask you about because of her name. You have a character named Mary Louise. She works in audio. She's a podcaster. She's a total busybody. Yeah. What was the inspiration?

It wasn't you, I promise. You've disappointed me again. I'm so sorry. But yeah, she's got a podcast. She's the wife of his best friend from college days. And Mary Louise is sort of a busybody. And we like her and then we don't like her so much. And, you know, it's one of these things that you want a character who another character is going to rub up against and create sparks. And that's what Mary Louise is for in the book.

Joseph Fender, he is author of The Oligarch's Daughter. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Marloes. This message comes from Thrive Market. The food industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, but not everything on the shelf is made with your health in mind.

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Author Joe Nesbo gets into some reader psychology in this next interview about his book Blood Ties. How do you get readers to side with someone who is a monster? Apparently, give the monster a problem to solve. Here's NPR's Mary Louise Kelly again. There

The writer Joe Nesbo has a knack for coming up with sentences like this, quote, quote,

In other words, I dare you, reader, to attempt to stop reading there. You know you're going to turn the page. You can't help yourself. Well, with more than 20 page turners now under his belt, including the Harry Hole detective novels, Nesbo has established himself as the king of Nordic noir. His latest is Blood Ties, and it reintroduces us to the unforgettable brothers Carl and Roy Upgard.

which gives me the chance to introduce you to Joe Nesbo. Hi there. Welcome. Hi. Hi. So that sentence I just read,

The guy talking about being a 35-year-old mass murderer who's now really ready to start a family. That is Roy Opgaard talking, one of the brothers. Tell us more about him. Well, he's a really nice guy. I mean, he's probably the nicest mass murderer I've been writing about. He's running a gas station in this small place in the mountains in Norway. He has a weakness. He tends to fall in love with his younger brother's girlfriends.

And that is part of what has led him on the way to becoming a mass murderer. On the other hand, he has some of the murders has been simply bad luck. And most of them has been out of love, not out of hate. So here's my challenge as a writer is, of course, to describe to you and convince you that Roy is a

A guide that you can root for. Yeah, just stay on that for a second, because that is quite a challenge to write a likable murderer who people want to root for.

I once spoke to a famous film director. It was actually Christopher Nolan who told me that, you know, the old cliche that you have to have your protagonist save a cat at the start of a story. That is what makes the audience root for him. It's not actually true. What you need to do is to put your protagonist in trouble, some kind of problem that needs solving. And automatically, as an audience or as readers, we will

try to help this person solve his problem. Roy is a guy with a lot of problems that need solving, and he needs our help to solve them, I think. With all that in our head, tell us about the other brother, Carl. Well, Carl is the better-looking guy, and

And intellectually, maybe the smarter guy. But he is not as likable when you get to know him as Roy is. He's popular with the girls, popular with everybody. And he has returned to this small town in the mountains in Norway, coming from abroad. He brought his wife that Roy, of course, fell in love with and did tragically. But he is now running...

a big hotel in this little town. And this hotel is actually what is saving the town from being erased from the map.

You've said Carl's marriage ended tragically. I mean, just to spell out a little bit more, the history of these two brothers includes Roy sleeping with Carl's wife, and then Carl, the married brother, kills the wife by hitting her on the head with an iron, and then they dispose of her body together. And I just want readers to know I'm giving nothing away here. All this has been revealed by page 28. How do you come up with this stuff?

I don't know, really. It may sound a bit strange, but my job...

normally starts at like five o'clock in the morning when I wake up in bed and I try to come up with an idea for the next chapter of a book and I come up with quite horrific stuff like this and it makes me really happy you know it's okay I know I have an exciting day in front of me trying to describe what's in my head it can be a love story or it can be a murder it doesn't really matter it just makes me happy if I sense that there's good

Good storytelling in the idea. I want to hear more about this little town, the quiet, pretty spa town of Oz, because it's such a stark contrast to your characters who are, as we've already noted, lying and killing people and blackmailing other characters in the book. This one town, it contains so many secrets. Is that something particular to Norway or do you think small towns everywhere? Yeah.

have people papering over their dark secrets. Actually, I think that as a town, the novel is partly inspired by an American novelist, Jim Thompson, who wrote Population 1280. But it's also a portrait of a typical Norwegian town

small town. I grew up in cities myself, but my parents, they were born and raised in a small town. So I spent summer and Christmas holidays there. I played in a band that for the first few years, we traveled and toured mostly small towns in Norway. So I think I know quite well the pros and cons of little towns. It's the safety of people taking care of each other,

On the other hand, it's the claustrophobic feeling of everybody knowing more or less everything about you. There are, of course, secrets, like you said, in this town. Most of them are in the open.

I'm still just sitting here turning over in my head what you just said. This is a, I think you just said, a totally typical little Norwegian town. I'm thinking, oh my God, like everyone in it is either sleeping with someone they shouldn't be sleeping with or killing someone who they obviously should not be killing. Typical, really? Well, the town is typical. The body count is definitely not typical for Norway. Norway has probably one of the lowest numbers

murders per year in any country. So I'm using, of course, the crime genre and the thriller genre for telling stories about hopefully the human condition. Before you wrote novels, you were a star soccer player. You were, as you nodded to, lead singer and guitar player in a rock band. You were also a guy with a finance background.

desk job. Talk a little bit more about that idea that as a writer, you put into your fictional characters a little bit of yourself. You had a lot to work with. Yeah, well, I think it was good for me that I didn't write my first novel until I was 37, that I had lived a, let's call it a normal life up until then, a working life. So I had like

This material that I had sort of stored up during those years. And I come from a storytelling family. My father and my mother and my brothers, my aunts and uncles, they were all storytellers. So that was like my writer's school, I think.

And it was probably also one of the reasons why I wrote my first novel so late in life, that I was worried what they would think about my storytelling. But writing lyrics for my band, that was also like a writer's school. I think that writing a story in three verses and a refrain is a great way of

Teaching yourself that you need to leave up to the readers to imagine most of the story. You can only point them in the right direction and give them certain ideas. And the more you leave up to the reader, the better it will probably be. As the writer Joe Nesbo, his latest novel is titled Blood Ties. Joe Nesbo, thank you. Thank you so much.

That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. Let us know what you think. You can write to us at bookoftheday at npr.org. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The podcast is produced by Danica Panetta and Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Gabe O'Connor, Martha Ann Overland, Brianna Scott, Christopher Antagliata, Danny Hensel, Ed McNulty, Emiko Tamagawa, Todd Muntz, Erica Ryan, and Patrick Jaron Watanenon. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.

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