The Redbreast: A Harry Hole Novel (Harry Hole Series, 3)

Like the other Joe Nesbo novels I have read so far, The Redbreast engages the reader from the very start and keeps the reader engaged throughout the book. Using shifting time periods and various locations , the reader continues the saga of Harry Hole, a flawed police investigator , with the Norwegian Police Crime Squad.

The storyline alternates between the service of Norwegian Nazis serving in the Waffen SS in WWII near Leningrad, War-torn Germany, and 1999 Norway coming to grips with its emerging neo-Nazi movement. Along the way, the reader gets a glimpse of how Norway dealt with its collaborators at the end of WWII and the period just after the war.

Since it is Joe Nesbo, he leads the reader along a primrose path to keep the reader guessing whom the guilty party until the very end.

Just when the reader has determined the murderer's identity, in typical Joe Nesbo fashion, we find it is actually someone else. Joe twists the reader’s psyche with ease.

You must read this novel.

After Detective Inspector Harry Hole's quick action and training lead him to an action that embarrasses the government, he is kicked upstairs and given routine tasks. The Oslo police may think that they have quieted Harry and his penchant for discovering crimes that others miss, following them to whatever conclusion he finds, but that's not how Harry rolls.

Harry is shunted into a surveillance of old Nazis, those men who years before fought with the Germans during World War II. For a while, it was seen as the patriotic thing to do, although these same men were considered traitors after the war. Now, Oslo is seeing a disturbing rise of Neo-Nazis, and who better to get the scoop on these old men who seem to be inspiring younger men to use violence against the immigrants who have come to Norway to start a new life.

Harry soon discovers a secret that is taking the lives of these few old men left from that earlier time. He discovers that a high-powered rifle useful mainly for assassinations has been illegally imported and reports his findings to his superiors, who ignore his concerns. The former Nazis and their family members start to show up murdered. Can Harry unravel the mystery of what happened all those years ago before someone else is killed?

This is one of the earliest Harry Hole mysteries and fans of the series will enjoy learning Harry's back story. This is when he meets the love of his life, Rakel, and starts his partnership with Halvorsen. We learn about Harry's life as a boy and the sister he loves dearly. Jo Nesbo is definitely one of the premier suspense writers of the current mystery scene, and The Redbreast shows the seeds of how his books will emerge as the series continues. This book is recommended for mystery lovers.

Book Description

Detective Harry Hole embarrasses the Norwegian police force during a U.S. Presidential visit so he is reassigned to the Norwegian Security Service as an Inspector (a promotion that gets him out of the way and is supposed to shut him up). Assigned to investigate what should be a rather mundane case, Hole instead finds himself getting embroiled in a possible assassination plot that has its roots in World War II--involving some Norwegians who served on the Eastern Front in the service of the Germans. Plunging Hole into the world of Norway's current crop of neo-Nazis and the men who served on the Eastern Front, he finds himself involved in a complicated case that gets more complex and confusing as time goes on--as well as threatening the lives of those that Harry holds dear.

My Thoughts

Although this isn't the first Harry Hole novel, it is the first one that was translated into English. Therefore, we're plunged right into Hole's world with little introduction. We quickly learn that Harry has a drinking problem, which he is fighting with the help of his brilliant young partner Ellen. The relationship between Harry and Ellen was the highlight of the book for me. Their partnership and banter felt authentic and livened up what was often a confusing read.

The confusion part came mostly from the events that take place in flashback during the war. We learn of several events that concern a small contingent of soldiers on the Eastern Front, which we know is related to Harry's current case. Exactly how they are related becomes clearer as the novel progresses, but I personally struggled to keep up with everything. Nesbø gives his readers a lot of balls to juggle, and I confess I wasn't always successful in keeping them all up in the air. In fact, I was actually thinking of quitting the book about midway through, but I kept on. Part of my problem was the disorientation of being thrust into a series without being properly introduced to the main protagonist. Another was the Norwegian surnames (which was also a problem for me in the Steig Larsson books.) The other issue was the sheer complexity of the plot and my inability to hold it all together in my head.

However, there were moments where I started really getting into the story, and I began to glimpse what might have attracted others to this author. I liked that Nesbø didn't choose to tell his story in a completely conventional way. At one point, each chapter is a series of answering machine messages. (This section was brilliantly done and really affected me emotionally.) So, although The Redbreast didn't set my world on fire, I'm willing to give Nesbø another try. The next book in the series is Nemesis, so I'll suppose I'll give that one a go before deciding whether to continue with the series. (For the record, the order of the series for the books that have been translated into English is: The Redbreast, Nemesis, The Devil's Star, The Redeemer, The Snowman and The Leopard.)

Recommended for: Fans of complex police procedurals, readers looking for the "next Steig Larsson" (for the record, I don't think Nesbø is the next Larsson but I can see why people make that comparison)

This is one of those books that lives up (or down) to the cover. On my edition, the publisher tells you that if you liked "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" you'll want to read this. Frankly I wasn't that impressed with Dragon Tattoo, and this book frankly isn't even as good as that. The author does a decent job with the leaden prose that made Dragon Tattoo so dreary and evoked (more or less) the Scandinavian countryside, but here the plot isn't even very good, and the premise is silly at its best parts, and just preposterous at other times. The author knows little about firearms (I'm not an expert, but any idiot knows that a revolver doesn't have a magazine) and has the typical (for Scandinavians anyway) fetish for Nazi villains, who are always drawn in the most obvious This-is-the-BAD-GUY shades, so that there's really no suspense at all.

So to the plot. Protagonist Harry Hole (mention is never made of the crude double entendre of his name, in spite of the fact he speaks English) is doing security during President Clinton's visit to Oslo for the accords of that name, which hopefully will lead to peace in the Middle East. While the President's motorcade approaches Harry sees a suspicious character, then sees the guy's armed with an automatic weapon, and shoots him--only to find out later he's a wayward Secret Service Agent. This clumsy plot device leads to Harry being promoted and transferred to a political division of the Norwegian police, which deals with things like arms smuggling. Harry immediately begins to investigate an incident that perhaps reveals that someone in Norway has bought an extremely powerful rifle (which doesn't exist in r/l) called a Marklin, which comes in 16mm. and fires incredibly expensive bullets. Only assassins use this gun (why would you buy one then?) so of course Harry's suspicious, and when he discovers that a white supremacist (who slipped out of a conviction on a violent crime on a technicality) is involved in the sale, he naturally has to investigate. His partner gets killed (under particularly silly circumstances) and that just spurs him to investigate further.

The whole plot is preposterous. The book is held down by lengthy flashbacks to the World War II era, where a group of Norwegians serve on the Eastern Front near Leningrad. Somehow one of them survives and becomes obsessed with various things, and of course he's the one who wants the rifle, so he can shoot unspecified people. The soldiers in the World War II section are hard to distinguish from one another, and the events there are hard to discern. Once you (sort of) figure out what's going on, you don't really care (or at least I didn't). One of the characters is wounded, and improbably winds up in a hospital in Vienna, stereotypically falling in love with the nurse, though of course there are consequences and complications. By the time the author was tying up the loose ends in the last hundred pages, and trying to resolve the current mystery also, I had mostly lost interest.

This has been my last Harry Hole novel. I bought "The Redbreast", the third book in the series, over a year ago, eager to read after the promise of intense crime and gruesome killings. It's comparison to the amazing Millennium series didn't hurt either. So when I heard the first two books where finally being published in English, I put this one on the back burner. I was disappointed by the first and second book equally, but was told to endure. That the first two where not nearly as good as the third, and that the series only got better from there. Unfortunately, I was extremely disappointed.
"The Redbreast" was slow, switching back and forth from present day 2000 and war-torn 1940's. Detective Harry Hole, the supposed alcoholic who is often on the wagon, was actually boring enough to make me yawn. He is depicted as a tragic, emotionally unstable wreck who was incapable of human interaction, though he has a surprising number of friends and fairly good social skills. The olden-day plot bored me to tears, and sadly I didn't get far enough into the story to find out the connection between the two eras. I won't be reading this series any further.

Stieg Larsson's [[ASIN:0857050141 Millennium Trilogy]] made Scandinavian crime fiction hip again. So, in the wake of his success (and the vacuum created by his untimely death in 2004), Jo Nesbo was brought in to fill the empty spotlight. With only mixed results, I am afraid.

I decided to start with REDBREAST because it is the first book of his Harry Hole series that has been translated in English (although there had been two books previous to this one in Norwegian - and there are references to the hero's previous cases). The story may be a standalone but the character development suffers from this truncation.

The story of REDBREAST steps on two timelines that slowly converge. One is the story of a group of young Norwegian Nazis fighting on the side of the Germans during WWII. The other is a mess of a police story where a mistake prone Harry Hole stumbles onto a case of the import of a vintage (and extremely expensive) sniper rifle and then manages to fumble most clues and miss a number of opportunities to solve the mystery long before its climax.

I am not going to continue with any more books by this writer. The narration feels forced, with a number of mood-killing reality TV references, predictable stereotypes and one-page chapters. What is worse, the characters are both underdeveloped and internally inconsistent. Nesbo is clearly not in Larsson's league.

I gave the book an extra star for cantor. When the Germans themselves try to squiggle out of their national shame of supporting Nazism (not to mention still avoiding paying their WWII debts), it was brave for Nesbo to admit that the majority of Norwegians in the 1940's indeed supported the National Socialists and were willing collaborators of Hitler's vision.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book does not justify the admission price.

I wrote the paragraphs below many months ago after giving up on this book. More recently, I needed a book and so I finished it. I have to say it got better and I'm glad I finished it, so I'm increasing my rating from two stars to three. However, my thoughts about the first half still stand. Act One should have been summarized down by 60% at least. The plot didn't even get off the ground until halfway though. Even then, it didn't turn out to be that memorable. Also, Nesbo continually commits what I consider to be an unpardonable sin for a writer in this genre: He hasn't done his homework on firearms and continually gets the details way wrong in this area. I probably won't be reading anything else by this author.

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I bought this book due to the positive reviews and because I like the Wallander series by Henning Mankell and I saw some possible character similarities (brooding, alchoholic, Scandinavian police detective). I am big detective procedural fan in general, everything from Conan Doyle to John Sandford.

I have finally given up on "Redbreast" about halfway through. Reading it is like trying to run through mud compared with any good book from this genre. First reason: lack of character development. Halfway through I don't feel I have any meaningful insight into the main characters as people and therefore I don't find what they do interesting and I don't care what happens to them. The main character, Harry Hole, seems to have some interesting character potential, but it is never realized. Second, the plot is very convoluted. It is a series of real time events interlaced with historical flashbacks to what at first seems like an unrelated military/love story set in WWII. It quickly becomes obvious that the WWII story is the background for the murder plot in the current day. Thats all well and good, but past that point the constant fashback sequences just become tedious and confusing.

This was my first foray into the new-style popular Scandinavian world of thrillers and must say I was not overly impressed. Harry Hole the detective is a troubled alcoholic and, unfortunately, isn't particularly interesting. This is the first problem with the book. The second is a plot which makes little sense. An aggrieved Norwegian ex-Nazi has plans for murder and decides to draw unnecessary and unwanted attention to himself by ordering a particularly powerful sniper rifle. As Hole starts to peer into the nasty world of Norwegian Nazis, we are taken back to World War Two, where Norwegians signed up to fight for the Nazis. Chapter after confusing chapter follow as a group of Norwegians fight against the Russians and wind up in different parts of Europe causing mischief. As the book crawls along we realise that one of the old Norwegians seems to have two personalities and this causes an already unconvincing plot to take on ever more water. I know something of Norway's wartime history but even that didn't do me much good as Nesbo wanders through clearly significant moments but doesn't really do much to explain why they are important. Another major challenge for the reader is that Hole seems to be working with a murderous colleague and doesn't seem too upset by this. By the time we get to the end we don't really care what happens, to be honest.

I was looking forward to finding a new mystery author with Joe Nesbo. What I found instead was a mediocre mystery with a twist that comes so far out of left field I almost couldn't finish it. I have heard from a friend of mine who runs a mystery review website that his later books are much better so I haven't lost all hope. But you can skip this one and be better off for it. It incorporates a good bit of history which is interesting and the best part of the book is the main character Hole. But the plot rambles, there are so many characters that I found it hard to follow what was going on, and as I mentioned earlier the twist at the end comes out of nowhere. It was difficult to finish.

I'm not a regular crime/mystery reader and came upon Nesbo upon recommendation after loving the Stieg Larsson trilogy. I started off enjoying this book and was even able to suspend my judgment after some huge leaps of faith in the plot. Harry Hole is an interesting character but some of his mannerisms are forced and unbelievable: trash in the office, driving old car that won't start, yelling out directives every 2 minutes, etc. I was able to continue on, but then it went on forever with too many time shifts (for me). And then the Norwegian names are very similar and after a while they just blend until it's like "Ok, whatever, I'm not going to go look back - let's just get on with it." Sooo, I wanted to like it but no dice for me. But still love the way the Scandinavians offer coffee.