Published in 2000, ‘The Redbreast‘ (Norwegian: Rødstrupe) is a crime novel by Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø, the third in the ‘Harry Hole’ series (but the first in the series to be available in English), after ‘The Bat‘ and ‘Cockroaches‘. A large part of the book is laid at the time of the Second World War – specifically, the Siege of Leningrad, wartime Vienna and the Bombing of Hamburg – making ‘The Redbreast’ a war novel as well as a crime novel. The book touches deeply on the still highly sensitive issue of Norwegian Collaboration with the Nazis and specifically the voluntary recruitment of Norwegians to the Waffen SS.
The novel was voted Best Norwegian Crime Novel ever. ‘The Redbreast’ is a fabulous introduction to Nesbø’s tough-as-nails series protagonist, Oslo police detective Harry Hole: a brilliant and epic novel, breathtaking in its scope and design, winner of ‘The Glass Key’ for best Nordic crime novel and selected as the best Norwegian crime novel ever written by members of Norway’s book clubs. It is a chilling tale of murder and betrayal that ranges from the battlefields of World War Two to the streets of modern-day Oslo in which one can follow Hole as he races to stop a killer and disarm a ticking time-bomb from his nation’s shadowy past. Vogue magazine says that “nobody can delve into the dark, twisted mind of a murderer better than a Scandinavian thriller writer”…and nobody does it better than Jo Nesbø!
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