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Plot
The Redeemer begins a number of years in the past, at a youth camp run by the Norwegian Salvation Army. A young, 14-year old girl - the daughter of a senior offical in the Salvation Army - is raped in a public toilet on the site by an un-named assailant. Due to the Salvation Army's strict hierarchical setup, she does not tell anyone about the ordeal.
Now in the present day, a hitman calling himself Stankic from Croatia kills a Salvation Army officer duing a Christmas street concert. The hitman has a facial anomoly known as hyperelasticity, wherein his facial muscles can be manipulated voluntarily to stop people from recognising him. As such, despite the murder happening in a public place the Norwegian police get little useful information regarding the murderer.
Meanwhile, the senior Police Inspector from the Oslo Police, Bjarne Møller, retires. As a parting gesture, he gives his three main officers, Jack Halvorsen (called Halvorsen by his colleagues), Beatte Lønn - Halvorsens girlfriend - and Harry Hole gifts. Harrys' is a wristwatch which grows to annoy Harry due to the incessant ticking of the second-hand. At one point, he even throws it out of the window of his apartment, though later recovers it from the packed snow. Møller is replaced by Gunnar Hagen.
Harry, Halvorsen and Beatte are assigned to the murder of the Salvation Army officer - a man called Robert Karlsen. When a murder attempt is made on Roberts' brother, Jon Karlsen it is believed that the Karlsen family is being attacked.
Harrys' former girlfriend, Rakel, has now left him and is with another man, Matthias Lund-Helgesen (a major character in the next Harry Hole novel, The Snowman) and Harry meets up - and eventually begins a relationship - with Martine, the young woman who (unbeknownst to Harry) was raped at the start of the novel.
Harry finds clues that lead him to Croatia and he makes contact with the hitmans' minder who is revealed to be the Stankic's mother. He makes a deal with her to save her sons' life, but upon returning to Norway discovers that a man wearing Stankic's clothes has been shot and killed by an armed police marksman. The dead mans' face is all but obliterated and identification is near-impossible.
There is a clue, however, in the dead mans' DNA, after Halvorsen is fatally wounded outside Jon Karlsens' flat. The blood of the dead man does not match that of Stankic, whose blood was found at the scene of the attack on Halvorsen. Harry continues to follow Stankic, but now knows that Stankic was contracted to kill Jon Karlsen by Jon Karlsen himself. Jon switched places with his brother (the two looked very similar so Stankic did not notice the difference) in order for that murder of his brother could not be blamed on him. When in Croatia, setting up the hit, Jon had posed as Robert.
Jon is also swindling the Salvation Army out of 5,000,000 Krone for an apartment block. On the night of an indoor Christmas concert in a concert hall, Jon Karlsen stands up his girlfriend, Thea, claiming that his father - in Singapore - is ill and that he is going to fly out to him. Stankic and - later - Harry Hole both get the details from Thea that Jon is about to fly out of the country.
Stankic catches up with Jon Karlsen in a toilet block some distance from the main airport terminal. Harry also catches up with the two of them there. He gets Jon Karlsen to give a full confession, stating that anything said with a gun (Stankic's) to his head is inadmissible in court. Jon tells everything, believing that he will be set free, but Harry instead tells Stankic that Jons' bag contains the 5,000,000 Krone and walks away. Behind him a single shot is heard.
Part of the confession includes how it was Jon Karlsen, not Stankic, who fatally wounded Halvorsen. Harry also knows that it was Jon who raped Martine some years earlier, and that he has been raping young girls regularly ever since.
Due to the high valuation that an antique dealer puts on the watch given to him by Bjarne Møller, Harry also realises that his former boss was involved in the same group of corrupt police officers as his former nemesis, Tom Waaler. Harry goes to Bergen to speak with Møller but - after Møller describes that he was trying to do what was best for the Force, Harry elects not to arrest him.
Buy The Redeemer - A Harry Hole Novel Here