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Summary
Summary
"An elegant and complex thriller....Harrowingly beautiful."
--New York Times Book Review
"A hugely impressive achievement--ambitious in scope, and skilled in execution."
--Los Angeles Times
"The Redbreast certainly ranks with the best of current American crime fiction."
--Washington Post
No disrespect meant to Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, but Jo Nesbø, the New York Times bestselling author of The Snowman, is the most exciting Scandinavian thriller writer in the crime fiction business. The Redbreast is a fabulous installment in Nesbø's tough-as-nails series protagonist, Oslo police detective Harry Hole. A brilliant and epic novel, breathtaking in its scope and design--winner of The Glass Key for best Nordic crime novel and selected as the best Norwegian crime novel ever written by members of Norway's book clubs--The Redbreast is a chilling tale of murder and betrayal that ranges from the battlefields of World War Two to the streets of modern-day Oslo. Follow Hole as he races to stop a killer and disarm a ticking time-bomb from his nation's shadowy past. Vogue magazine says that "nobody can delve into the dark, twisted mind of a murderer better than a Scandinavian thriller writer"...and nobody does it better than Jo Nesbø! James Patterson fans should also take note.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Shifting effortlessly between the last days of WWII on the Eastern front and modern day Oslo, Norwegian Nesbi (The Devil's Star) spins a complex tale of murder, revenge and betrayal. A recovering alcoholic recently reassigned to the Norwegian Security Service, Insp. Harry Hole begins tracking Sverre Olsen, a vicious neo-Nazi who escaped prosecution on a technicality. But what starts as a quest to put Olsen behind bars soon explodes into a race to prevent an assassination. As Hole struggles to stay one step ahead of Olsen and his gang of skinheads, Nesbi takes the reader back to WWII, as Norwegians fighting for Hitler wage a losing battle on the Eastern front. When the two story lines finally collide, it's up to Hole to stop a man hell-bent on carrying out the deadly plan he hatched half a century ago in the trenches. Perfectly paced and painfully suspenseful, this crime novel illuminates not only Norway's alleged Nazi ties but also its present skinhead subculture. Readers will delight in Hole, a laconic hero as doggedly stubborn as Connelly's Harry Bosch, and yet with a prickly appeal all his own. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A pair of assassination attempts bookend 50 years of postwar history in this bold, ambitious thriller. Oslo Detective Harry Hole's last case left him with a toxic reputation (The Devil's Star, 2006). Now he has to make a snap judgment about an unauthorized man waiting with an Uzi in the path of the visiting American president. The man he shoots turns out to be a Secret Service agent, but the Norwegian government, with no stomach for creating an international incident that might embarrass a fervent ally, promotes Harry to Inspector and boots him over to the National Security Service to keep him out of trouble. Thanks to his new posting, Harry, without at first knowing it, becomes the man most likely to foil a second assassination--this one terribly real and steeped in a series of betrayals that go back to World War II. Some of the intrigue in the dizzying series of cuts between past and present is ham-handed, and the shadowy figure variously known as Uriah (in 1944) and the Prince (in 1999) may tax some readers' patience. But it's well worth sticking with the story; both the hero and the villain are as compelling as the portrayal of Norwegians doing whatever it takes to survive the war and then paying the price. Nesbø bids fair to turn Norway into serious competition for Sweden as Scandinavia's crime center. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Nesbo has been one of Norway's leading crime-fiction authors for 10 years, and his American debut shows why. Moving from World War II to the last days of 1999 and into the new century, the novel unfurls a complex plot in which the wounds of history continue to bleed in the present. The hero, alcoholic Oslo detective Harry Hole, is still grieving the loss of a colleague in an incident that may have been his fault; he is shocked from his lethargy by a new case with tentacles stretching back to a band of Norwegian soldiers who fought for the Nazis against the Russians. History has made the Norwegian veterans pariahs, and long-simmering resentments have come to the surface, fueled by the emergence of a strengthening neo-Nazi movement in Norway. As Hole follows the trail back into the past, he finds himself forced to rethink commonly accepted assumptions about his country and his own life. The linking of past to present through alternating story lines is a common technique in crime fiction, but Nesbo uses it superbly here, with the two plots interacting dynamically and adding context to our understanding of the central theme in contemporary Scandinavian crime fiction: the rise of racism and hate crime in the post-iron curtain era. But beyond that, Nesbo has a terrific feel for character, and Hole, while sharing characteristics with so many similarly melancholic modern cops (including, of course, Mankell's Kurt Wallander), carves a place of distinction for himself in a crowded field.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Early in THE REDBREAST (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.95), an elegant and complex thriller by the Norwegian musician, economist and crime writer Jo Nesbo, an old man who has just received a death sentence from his doctor goes into the palace gardens in Oslo and kills an ancient oak tree. "Yes!" you think. "What a terrible act, but what wonderful symbolism!" And you'll be amazed when, hundreds of pages later, the real reason for the aboricide is revealed, along with the answers to other seemingly minor mysteries (including the significance of the title) that figure in the novel's ingenious design. The engineering of the interlocking plot pieces is intricate because it has to support Nesbo's complicated ideas - and dire thoughts - about Norwegian nationalism, past and present. While giving his ambitious book the form of a police procedural, featuring Harry Hole, an attractive if familiarly flawed loose cannon of a cop, the author expands his street-level subplots into a narrative that reaches all the way back to World War II, when Norway was under German occupation. There's a pattern to the various criminal activities Hole investigates, from the black-market sale of a German semiautomatic hunting rifle ("the ultimate professional murder weapon") to the "fascist nests" of neo-Nazis who can be counted on to disrupt most national holidays. But the pattern doesn't emerge until the detective investigates the present-day lives and past histories of a group of war veterans, among the many Norwegians who volunteered to fight against the Russians on the Eastern front and were later denounced as traitors. Told in flashbacks, the parallel story of their forgotten war begins in a trench in 1942, develops in harrowingly beautiful scenes of harsh wartime suffering and ends in 1945 with mass executions in Oslo. Pristinely translated by Don Bartlett, Nesbo's book eloquently uses its multiple horrors to advance a disturbing argument: suppressing history is an open invitation for history to repeat itself. For sheer likability, no private eye comes close to Sue Grafton's endearing California sleuth, Kinsey Millhone, who has been making friends with readers for more than two decades. Settling into T IS FOR TRESPASS (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95), the 20th mystery in an evergreen series, first means making sure that all's right in Kinsey's world. Is it still the 1980s in Santa Teresa? Check. Is she still renting a studio apartment from her octogenarian landlord, Henry - and is Henry still baking bread? Check and check. Now for the kicker: Does she still have her warm heart and wicked sense of humor? Absolutely. Just because Kinsey is adorable doesn't make her a pushover, and the issue she takes up here - criminal negligence and abuse of the elderly - is as serious as it is ugly. Gus Vronsky, a cranky old neighbor, has a bad fall at Christmastime, and his greatniece from New York hires a licensed vocational nurse named Solana Rojas to take care of him, after first hiring Kinsey to check her credentials. But aside from noticing that "there's something creepy about her," Kinsey doesn't know what we do (from chapters told from the caretaker's perspective) - namely that "Solana" stole her identity and has evil plans for Gus. For all its familiar comforts, this is one sad, tough book. Ian Rutledge, the Scotland Yard man in Charles Todd's outstanding series of historical mysteries, has a wonderful capacity for compassion - a quality this shell-shocked (and guilt-ridden) World War I veteran acquired over four hellish years in the battlefields of France. That heightened sensibility comes into play in A PALE HORSE (Morrow, $23.95), when the War Office orders Rutledge to locate an eccentric scientist who has disappeared from his secluded cottage in Berkshire. In penetrating interviews with the scientist's reclusive neighbors, Rutledge comes to realize that they're all emotionally wounded outcasts of society ("lepers, without the sores") and that many of the secrets they're guarding go back to the Great War. Even the huge prehistoric animal carved into the whitechalk cliffs above the cottages reminds one tenant of the cloud of poison gas that passed over Ypres like "a great horse moving across a barren meadow." However they apportion their literary chores, the mother and son who write together as Charles Todd clearly share an affinity for quiet souls haunted by unquiet memories. Runaway capitalism can be held accountable for a multitude of social sins, but can it be blamed for the acts of a serial killer? That's one of the many intriguing questions posed by the poet and translator Qiu Xiaolong in his latest Inspector Chen mystery, RED MANDARIN DRESS (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95). The erudite Shanghai detective (who writes romantic poetry to clear his head) has to postpone his participation in an intensive course in classical Chinese literature when murder victims wearing identical mandarin dresses begin turning up around the city. Are these aberrant crimes somehow linked to modern China's struggle to contain the widespread corruption that accompanies unregulated economic growth? You bet. But the novel also contains pertinent references to the huge ideological upheaval of the Cultural Revolution - a subject that's never far from the surface in this intelligent series - along with many poignant hints that once it's lost, a country's cultural identity can never be restored. Jo Nesbo's thriller takes us back to World War II and the German occupation of his native country.
Library Journal Review
Scandinavian crime fiction is all the rage, and here's another book to add to your collection. Winner of Norway's top award in this category, Nesbi crafts a story that races all over the map as an alcoholic cop digs into a mystery dating back to World War II. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.