The Devil's Star (Harry Hole, #5)

by Jo Nesbø

He had got her the job in the bar at Head On. And because of the pills she hadn’t felt like going straight from work to Blindern University, where she was studying to become a sociologist. However, the time for Petter, pills and dreams of becoming a sociologist was over and one day she found herself alone with debts for unfinished studies and pills to pay off, and a job at the most boring bar in Oslo. So Barbara dropped everything, borrowed money from her parents and went off to Lisbon to get her life back on an even keel and perhaps learn a little Portuguese. Lisbon was a wonderful time. The days passed in a whirl, but this didn’t bother her. Time was simply something that came and went, until the money stopped coming, until Marco was no longer ‘true until eternity’ and the fun was over. She returned home a few experiences older; she had learned, for example, that Ecstasy was cheaper in Portugal than in Norway, but it made a mess of your life in just the same way, that Portuguese was an extremely difficult language and that time was a limited, nonrenewable resource.