The Redbreast

Harry Hole, sidelined after an embarrassing incident during a presidential visit, is assigned to monitor neo-Nazi activity in Oslo. A rare and expensive rifle has entered the country, and nobody knows who bought it or why.

Alongside this runs a second narrative set in 1944, following Norwegian volunteers fighting for Germany in the trenches outside Leningrad.

A rifle bought in the present, and a debt incurred in 1944.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The novel's subject is the Norwegian volunteers who fought for the Waffen-SS, the treatment of them afterwards, and the country's preference for a simplified account of the occupation in which everyone resisted.

This is genuinely uncomfortable national material, and Nesbø handles it with more seriousness than anything else in the series.

The 1944 sections are written as a continuous narrative rather than as flashback fragments, and they are substantial enough to function as a novella inside the book.

The two strands converge late, and the identity linking them is the plot's central concealment. The construction is ambitious and mostly successful.

The Eastern Front material is the strongest writing Nesbø has done: cold, lice, boredom, sudden death and the specific psychology of men who have chosen the losing side for reasons they can no longer articulate.

It is researched carefully and rendered without either glamour or easy condemnation.

The present-day plot is ultimately a revenge narrative with a very long fuse, and the moral weighting is deliberately unstable: the avenger's grievance is real and his method is indefensible.

Nesbø refuses to resolve this. The book's sympathies are genuinely divided in a way his later novels rarely are.

He is already alcoholic and insubordinate but less damaged than in the later books, and his relationships here — with Ellen, with Rakel — set up consequences that run through the rest of the series.

This is where the series' emotional architecture is built, which is why it is usually recommended as the real starting point.

The contemporary far-right material is specific: a bookshop, a skinhead scene, a network of older sympathisers, and police who regard it as a nuisance rather than a threat.

Nesbø connects present and past without arguing that they are identical, which is a more careful position than the premise might suggest.

It is long, with a slow first third that establishes two settings and a large cast before the connection between them becomes visible.

Readers who persevere generally find the final quarter the strongest writing in the entire series, where the two timelines resolve against each other and several apparently incidental details from the 1944 sections turn out to have been load-bearing all along.

Harry's partner is the most likeable character in the book, and what happens to her drives several subsequent novels.

Her treatment has been criticised as an instance of a woman existing to motivate a male protagonist, which is a fair description of the function even if the writing is better than the pattern usually allows.

Plainer and less propulsive than The Snowman, with more descriptive writing and a slower rhythm.

The translation by Don Bartlett is generally considered good, and the 1944 sections in particular read with a gravity that the contemporary chapters do not always match. The tonal gap between the two strands is noticeable, and probably unavoidable.

It is the third Hole novel but the first translated into English, which caused lasting confusion. The two preceding books are set largely outside Norway and are not required.

It is the correct place to begin the series, since the consequences established here run through every subsequent volume.

It won the Norwegian booksellers' prize and has been voted the best Norwegian crime novel of all time by readers of a national newspaper.

Among Nesbø's own books it is generally considered his most substantial, chiefly because of the historical material and because it is the one novel where he is plainly writing about something other than a crime. The later books are more efficient and less serious.