Plot introduction
This time there's a bank robbery in Oslo, but Harry also has to deal with two females that are important to him, while trying to stay away from the alcohol that he loves so dearly.
Buy Nemesis: A Novel (Harry Hole) Here
Synopsis
A bank robbery takes place by a single robber in a balaclava. Holding a bank teller as a hostage he demands that the bank ATM be emptied within 25 seconds, or he will kill the hostage. To cover his voice, he makes the hostage voice his demands, whispered into her ear. The bank manager empties the ATM, but it takes him 31 seconds. Having been given the money, the robber whispers again to the hostage before shooting and killing her.
Initially given to the robberies unit, the case is unsolved. However, a video evidence expert, Beatte Lønn, determines that, since the robber and hostage are intimately close together, the robber knew his victim very well and the case is moved to a dual-investigation with Lønn and Harry Hole working on the case as a murder investigation.
Further bank robberies occur in the same way. However, successful emptying of the ATMs within the specified time mean that no other tellers are murdered.
Whilst his girlfriend, Rakel, and her son, Oleg, are in Russia on a parental custody case (Olegs' father, a Russian businessman has demanded custody of his son), Harry Hole goes to see an old girlfriend, Anna Bethsen at her flat. Anna, an artist of some apparently limited skill, intends to have an art show which she wants to call Nemesis for reasons that she does not truly explain.
Harry awakens in his own flat the following morning with the classic signs of a hangover, headache and short-term memory loss regarding the events of the night before. Later that day, Anna Bethsen is found, apparently murdered in her flat. Attempts by the murderer to make the death look like a suicide are apparently foiled as Harry knows Anna was left-handed, but the gun is held in her right hand.
Harry, who has managed to cover up his presence in Annas' flat on the night of her death now is in a race against time to discover the murderer before he is implicated himself. With no memory of the night in question he is even uncertain that he himself, is not the murderer. Since Anna was a gypsy, Harry enlists the help of Annas' uncle, Raskol, a former bank robber who is in prison.
Evidence linking Annas' murder with the bank robberies sends Harry and Beatte Lønn on a visit to a suspect in São Paulo, Brazil, but the suspect has apparently committed suicide, and is found hanging from a beam in his home.
Harry receives a number of e-mails from the murderer, signed S2MN, which give Harry some level of insight to the murderer. Eventually, Detective Tom Waaler, a thorn in Harrys' side in the previous novel discovers Harry was in Annas' flat on the night of her death and prepares to arrest him. Harry now finds himself on the run.
He sends the incriminating e-mails to Beatte Lønn as evidence of his innocence, but it is discovered that the e-mails were being sent from Annas' laptop, via a modem connection in Harrys' own (missing) mobile phone, found located in the cellar under Harrys' flat. The mails were sent on a time-delay. Tom Waaler, meanwhile, finds another former lover of Annas', but shoots him dead when he seems to resist arrest, just as he had a murder suspect in the Redbreast investigation.
Eventually, Harry discovers that the bank robber is, in fact, the husband of the murdered bank tellar from the first robbery, who was threatening to leave him for his brother. Annas' death is revealed as a suicide, which she planned to confuse and convict Harry and two other former lovers who had apparently abandoned her. The strange signature on the e-mails, S2MN is revealed when Harry catches sight of the signature in a mirror. Now reading NM2S, he deduces that the 2 is representing an S, and that running the letters - NMSS - together phonetically, sounds like the word Nemesis, the name of Annas' intended art show. His "hangover" symptoms are shown by forensic evidence to be the effects of having been drugged.
Thanks to Raskols' gypsy contacts, Rakel wins the custody battle for Oleg and returns to Norway with him. Harry, however, has heard of a witness to the murder of his former colleague, Ellen, who was killed in the Redbreast investigation by a mysterious gun smuggler baron known as the Prince. The witness may have seen Ellens' murderer with the Prince and shows them a picture of his new prime suspect...
Buy Nemesis: A Novel (Harry Hole) Here