NEMESIS

Oslo’s favorite cowboy, Inspector Harry Hole, tackles the case of the serial bank robber with an itchy trigger finger.

A masked man walks into a bank, points a gun at a teller and announces that if the branch manager hasn’t emptied the till into his sack within 25 seconds, he’ll shoot her dead. When the manager runs six seconds over, the masked man makes good on his threat and escapes with the money. The subsequent investigation indicates that the robber was a professional unknown to the city’s fraternity of bank robbers, someone who acted with cool precision throughout the procedure and left no trace of his identity behind. So why would he do something as rash as murder Stine Grette in the middle of a highly successful job? Before a single clue has turned up, Harry (The Redbreast, 2007) finds himself with a second case that cuts much deeper: the apparent suicide of Anna Bethsen, the ex-lover with whom he spent the evening of her death. The trail to the bank robber, whom Harry alone insists on calling the killer, leads from a photograph inside Anna’s shoe to a not-so-successful importer to a bank-robbing prodigy holed up in Brazil. Before the case is over, Harry will become a fugitive framed for murder and forced to depend on his unlikely alliance with an imprisoned gypsy crime lord.

The high-intensity action is threaded through a series of Chinese boxes revealing one false solution after another before the brilliantly inventive final twist.