Jo Nesbo gives us a new sub-zero thriller

The Redeemer is a whopping good police procedural, with the inimitable Harry Hole up against all the usual demons—first and foremost, his own depressive alcoholism, but also the deaths of those close to him, a supervisor who just doesn’t get him, the love of his life who can’t be around him, and the darkest, coldest, most oppressive setting author Jo Nesbo can bring to life. I got the chills reading this and had to wrap a blanket around me, even in the middle of the dog days of a Virginia summer. That’s quite a triumph.

The story starts with the rape of a 14 year old girl at a Salvation Army summer camp and the unrelated horrors facing a child soldier in the Serbo-Croatian wars, leaps forward more than a decade to the contract killing of a Salvation Army member singing in a Christmas concert in Oslo, Norway, and spins from there into more sub-plots than I have fingernails to chew. Love triangles, sibling rivalry, religious zealotry, revenge killings, land grabs, silent killer dogs, invisible assassins, death by vacuum cleaner, drug addiction, and sub-zero temperatures – with Harry Hole plodding steadily through the clues and the cold while trying –not always successfully—to ignore the verboten flask of Jim Beam that calls to him.

Many reviewers have taken author Nesbo to task for his cliché hero, the solitary, goes-his-own-way detective who drowns his loneliness in alcohol, takes solace where and when he can find it, and hides his heart of gold and his police savvy behind a gruff exterior.  But Nesbo somehow manages to infuse Hole and the rest of his characters—bad and good guys alike–with a poignancy that keeps us coming back for more. The killer in The Redeemer, for example, is as relentless and frightening as they come, and yet over the course of the novel, the reader comes to understand why he does what he does, why he is the way he is and, along with Hole, develops some weird sort of sympathy for the guy. In fact, there is not a single character in Nesbo’s novels who is either black or white—we are shown individuals with all their flaws and weaknesses, some capable of change, some not, but all of them resonate as real human beings.

Nesbo also has a talent for leading the reader in many directions at once and giving us any number of scenarios and possible villains to choose from, and yet he manages to pull it all together through one unveiling after another, sort of like peeling back the layers of an onion. In The Redeemer, the climax is an especially dramatic and unexpected one, and left me stunned and breathless. Nesbo does it again.