Harry had driven right up to her house before he realised where he was. He stopped the car and stared between the trees. It was fifty or so metres to the house from the main road. There was light in windows on the ground floor.
'Idiot,' he said aloud and started at the sound of his own voice. He was about to drive off when he saw the front door open and light fall on the steps. The thought that she might see and recognise his car put him in a state of panic. He slotted the car into reverse so that he could back quietly and discreetly up the hill and out of sight, but he didn't have his foot hard enough on the accelerator and the engine died. He heard voices. A tall man in a long, dark coat had come out on to the steps. He was talking, but the person he was talking to was hidden by the door. Then he leaned in toward the door opening and Harry could no longer see them.
They're kissing, he thought. I've driven up to Holmenkollen to spy on a woman I've talked to for fifteen minutes kissing her boyfriend.
Then the door closed, and the man got into an Audi and drove past him down to the main road.
On his way home Harry wondered how he should punish himself. It had to be something severe, something that would have a deterrent effect for the future. An aerobics class at Focus.
-The Redbreast
Harry Hole is a great policeman, but when he's assigned to work security during a peace summit in Oslo, he makes a huge, potentially career-ending mistake. He goes on a bender, as is his wont. When he sobers up, he discovers he's been promoted. Bureaucracy.
His new position mostly involves him sitting in a lonely office at the end of the hall, pushing papers - it's a good place for his superiors to keep an eye on him, but it's soul-sapping work for him. And yet, even when he's only left with paperwork, Harry can't help but be a good detective. It isn't long before something catches his eye - a report of someone discovering spent ammunition from a Märklin rifle. It's an unusual weapon - "the ultimate professional murder weapon," in Harry's words. Naturally, he can't help but wonder what someone is planning to do with it.
Someone is planning Very Bad Things. The Redbreast tells both a story in the present, of Harry's pursuit of the Märklin riflesman, and one in the past - in 1944, to be specific, when some Norwegians, then under German occupation, chose to fight for Germany on the Eastern Front. It's a piece of history I was wholly unfamiliar with, and Nesbø does an excellent job weaving together history and fiction, past and present, including a link between the Norwegian defectors and the modern resurgence of neo-Nazism. The plot, as you might imagine, gets a bit complex - and I might even say there's one twist too many toward the end - but it's certainly clever and hugely absorbing. I was reluctant to put it down.
Harry Hole is a wonderful protagonist, another take on the damaged detective. He has little resembling a personal life (and you can see the trouble he gets into when he tries in that excerpt above) and only a tenuous grasp on sobriety. In the middle of the book, he leaves someone a series of absolutely gutting answerphone* messages while he (quite understandly, as it happens) is totally blitzed. But, unlike many of those fictional alcoholic renegade cops out there, Harry goes to the gym. He listens to Joy Division. (If I hadn't been sold on Harry already, that would have done it. I always find it mysterious that so many fictional detectives listen to classical and opera**.) Harry is his own man: a true Gen-Xer, he wears Doc Martens to court. Love.
Honestly, if I could have the next book in the series, Nemesis, in my hands now, it would be there. Alas, I could only find it in hardcover at the bookstore, and I had to be realistic about how I should spend my money. If I see it in paperback before I come home, though...
Up next: the 6th Sookie Stackhouse - the ultimate vacation reading!
*Yes, that was a bit over-the-top British, but gutting is without a doubt the best word for them. And answerphone, besides being the term used in the book, sounds so much better than the unwieldy answering machine, don't you think?
** Wallander, John Rebus, and Inspector Morse, I believe, just off the top of my head.
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