It's the week before Christmas in Oslo. A group of people gathered to hear a Salvation Army concert are bewildered when a man walks up and shoots one of the band's officers point blank. Investigator Harry Hole and his team are fairly certain the shooter is a Croatian contract killer known as the Little Redeemer, but no one can figure out who ordered the hit or why he was sent to Oslo--the only thing that's clear is that this was a case of mistaken identity, and the real target is still alive. Unfortunately for the murderer, bad weather has grounded all flights, and he's stuck in Oslo, realizing he killed the wrong man. Can he rectify his error and kill the right one before Harry catches him?
Jo Nesbø's anti-heroic protagonist is up to his usual antics in The Redeemer, the sixth Harry Hole novel in the original Norwegian sequence but the seventh available to American readers in an English translation. Harry is struggling to stay sober, resentful of his new boss and determined to solve the case, no matter how many rules he has to break.
Nesbø depicts the motivations of both the "good guys" and the "bad guys" with nuance; flawed detectives and believable criminals are all just seeking some sort of redemption. Fans of other Scandinavian mystery authors like Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and Arnaldur Indridason will want to add Nesbø to their reading lists, if they haven't already. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm