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The Redbreast Review

The police investigator hero of this Norwegian procedural is Harry Hole, a taciturn, uncompromising detective who marches to his own drummer. In this excellent thriller, he's on the track of a possible assassin in a case that takes us far into the past. I learned a lot about Norwegian history from this book. I had not been aware that several thousand Norwegians volunteered for the Waffen SS and served alongside the Nazis on the Eastern front. Of course, Norway's homegrown fascist leader Quisling did welcome the Nazi invasion of his country. The novel spells out what happened to him and to the Norwegian volunteers who returned home after the war. This book links them with the unpleasant neo-Nazi fringe in modern-day Norway, much in the same way as my own novel The Nazi Hunter: A Novel did in the United States.

We meet up with a small squad of Norwegians at the siege of Leningrad. The question is, what became of them and which of them is behind a strange series of murders in modern-day Oslo.

Hole is an attractive character, principled, determined, willing to bend the rules to get the "bad boys and girls" as he terms them. One does bond with some of these characters, which made the murder of one of them unbelievably poignant. The murder scene itself was superbly written.

The plot creaks here and there and relies a bit too much on the very long arm of coincidence. But this is a minor quibble. There are also a couple of very creepy males using their power to compel women to submit to them and a charming romance. All in all, an excellent read.

The Redbreast Overview

From one of the most celebrated crime writers in Europe comes an epic new novel, brilliant in scope and design—a deep and fearless investigation of betrayal spanning two centuries and three continents.

Police Detective Harry Hole has made a terrible mistake. An embarrassment in the line of duty has pulled him off his usual beat. Reassigned to mundane surveillance tasks, he reluctantly agrees to monitor neo-Nazi activities in Oslo. But as Hole is drawn into an underground world of illegal gun trafficking, brutal beatings, and sexual extortions, he soon learns that he must act fast to prevent an international conspiracy from unfolding.

Trapped in the crosshairs of the man with all the answers, Harry Hole plunges headlong into a mystery with roots deep in the past. His investigation takes him back to Norway's darkest hour—when members of the young nation's government collaborated with leaders of Nazi Germany. Dredging up a painful history of denial, Hole turns his attention to the Norwegian troops who fought for Adolf Hitler on the Eastern front. Branded by their countrymen as traitors, the soldiers who survived the brutal Russian winter—the hunger, fear, cold, grenades, and snipers—returned home as scapegoats of a nation's atonement. Sixty years later, old grudges and betrayals appear to have been laid to rest, until Hole realizes that someone has begun to pick off the surviving soldiers one by one.

With only his troubled, guilt-ridden conscience as a guide, Hole must move quickly through the traps and mirrors of a twisted criminal mind. But as his sanity slips in a slow burn of anger and alcohol, his mistakes continue to pile up. And if he fails to quicken the pace, Norway's darkest hour since World War II just might lie in the future.

In a tightly woven plot that takes readers from the icy steppes of the Russian front to a seemingly peaceful springtime in modern-day Oslo, Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø delves into a sinister national history with uncommon bravery. Transforming shades of moral gray into an explosive palette of characters, Nesbø holds readers in suspense until the final pages. His deft orchestration of parallel narratives knows no match in the genre, and his thematic reach exceeds even the most ambitious thrillers on the market. With the U.S. publication of The Redbreast, American readers will learn what European readers have known for a decade—that Nesbø's writing is "quite simply brilliant" (Weekend-Avisen, Denmark).

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Customer Reviews

So close to so good... - saintmaur -
I share many of the enthusiastic reactions of other reviewers of this novel. As a writer and storyteller, Nesbo is way in front of the recent Scandinavian masters of the genre who have, in my view, produced the best police procedurals in the last generation, though I find Henning Mankell (Kurt Wallender procedurals), the reigning champion of the genre, tedious. But Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, of some decades ago, still reign supreme.

Nesbo has some first-order talents: his characters are leanly drawn, yet complex; his story telling skills are masterful: the scenes of violence, for instance, are unexpected and devastating -to the reader as well as to the victims, and sometimes to the perpetrator. (Nesbo seems is more comfortable with violence than with tenderness, but maybe that's a weakness of the genre--and of his hero, Henry Hole.

In the end, unfortunately, the very richness and complexity of the plot paralyze the story. The denouement seemed contrived and self-conscious. The plot device used to convince the reader that the villain of the piece could be one and the same with one of its most noble characters was fatally unconvincing. The extensive `confession' of the culprit had a flatness that seemed entirely unsuited to the character and somehow vulgarized the entire experience. Part of the problem, I think, was that Nesbo had too much complexity to unravel at the end. There were too many important characters, all with much the same experiences, and with some pretending to be someone else, reducing the huge machine of a plot to a crawl for the final 50 pages

Moreover, some of the twists and turns seemed superfluous and distracted from the central story's momentum. Why for example did he need to introduce Sofia at all? Why the largely extraneous side story involving Inspector Waaler, which, astonishingly, was never resolved. Did Nesbo himself get so confused, he forgot to settle with this character?

So I was in the end hugely disappointed at this bravura undertaking-- because it came so close to being so good.

But I'll give Nesbo another chance; a thinner and more disciplined book could take him over the Sjowall/Wahloo bar.

good but not great - James Wygant - Portland OR
I share some of the opinions of both the fans and the critics of this book. The characters are well developed and the plot is engaging, but the translation sucks and there are too many similar characters to avoid confusion. I'm assuming a bad translation that gets common American English expressions laughingly wrong and also, as others have pointed out, reveals ignorance of common gun facts. A revolver does not have magazines, and a Glock is not a revolver. For a crime novel, that's pretty basic stuff. Getting it wrong presents inexcusable distractions. Also, although this book is available from an American publisher, I assume the folks at Harper never read it. It is actually a reprint of the translation to British English and spelling. It's odd that the biggest potential audience for this book does not get more consideration.

Not worth one star - L. Brodie -
I did not get very far into this trite book. From the first chapter I disliked it. We are taken to the scene of a possible attempt on the US President's life but right at the fatal moment the chapter ends. Then we are thrown back in time by 1 month. This is just such an obvious and stupid way to create suspense. I think the author may have seen too many Hollywood action shows. Or maybe he is hoping for a TV contract.

Stieg who? - playsindirt - Saint Charles, MO USA
Stieg who? Jo Nesbo is the bomb. Multi-layered thriller featuring Harry Hole, my new hero. Nesbo never stoops to obligatory sex like I felt Larsson did and he doesn't need too. Sharp writing. Very rarely do I say this but I couldn't put it down. And Nemesis is even better. I know there's some confusion over the reading order because the english translations were published out of sync. Read Redbreast first, then Nemesis, The Devil's Star, The Redeemer, The Snowman, and then The Leopard. The first two in the series (The Bat Man and Cockroaches) aren't available in english I don't believe.

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Tuesday, August 24, 2010