Harry Hole, the connoisseur’s choice of angst-ridden, alcoholic, obsessional Scandinavian detective, is back. The Redeemer, the fourth Harry Hole book to be translated into English is also the first in which Harry is sober and free of his nemesis, the corrupt chief detective Tom Waaler, last seen in the previous episode, er, Nemesis.

This time round Harry is on the trail of a Croatian hitman The Little Redeemer who is in Oslo to kill a high-ranking officer in the influential Salvation Army. What follows is a race against time, Day of the Jackal type storyline as Harry tries to stop the incresingly desparate hitman before he can fulfill his contract. In addition, Harry must discover who took it out in the first place and why? Once more it is Harry’s obsessional insistence on digging deeper than his procedurally bound superiors would wish that uncovers the (inevitably shocking) truth.

The story is, as ever with Nesbo, exciting. Perhaps for some a little too exciting, as one near miss and snowbound chase follows hot on the heels of another. No matter, the action is tense and the characters are individually drawn with care. This feels like a real world, of real people commiting real crimes, being investigated by people with real lives and idiosyncracies of their own. This is still recognisably the world of Scandinavian police thrillers as laid out by Sjowall and Wahloo, a world depicted with care and attention to detail but this time with more emphasis on the individual over the team. And on nightime snowbound chases.

Harry Hole is in the grand tradition of detectives who can’t, or rather won’t, play the system.  His motivations are the stuff of standard tarnished heroes, ie a doomed, romantic determination to understand evil and then to make a small but honest difference. Even alcoholism is, in his case, more a romantic desire for anaesthetisation rather than a huge and hugely debilitating, personal problem. Through all this baggage, Harry’s professionalism, integrity and desire to see right prevail inevitably comes through, even if, or rather especially when, the system seems to be  as much against him as the bad guys. Of course it’s standard wish-fulfilment for a hero, however compromised, to cut through the bureaucracy of our bought and sold world. But it’s a powerful wish that has as much resonance now as it ever did in the past.

So this is not groundbreaking and The Redeemer is nothing more revolutionary than a good tale, very well told about a group of characters that are really worth caring about. And that is more than enough to confirm the notion that publication of a new Jo Nesbo is cause for celebration.  If after the sturm und drang of the last couple of episodes it feels like a short pause for breath, The Redeemer nonetheless deserves to be considered as one of the very best crime novels of the year. Hooray for that.

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