Saviour

A hitman completes his task, but then discovers he shot the wrong man. Harry must protect the real victim.

It is August 1991. A fourteen-year-old girl is raped at a Salvation Army summer camp. 12 years later. Oslo is not only experiencing an Advent atmosphere, but also the coldest weather in the last twenty-four years. The Salvation Army organizes traditional pre-Christmas street concerts on the Eger Brothers Square and distributes soup from a large cauldron to those in need. On December 16th, in the early evening, a gunshot is heard amidst the sounds of music. A soldier standing by a cauldron of soup falls dead to the ground. A Croatian hitman with a red scarf around his neck has completed his last task and is leaving the scene of the crime unnoticed.

However, his flight to Zagreb is canceled due to heavy snowfall. The next day, looking at the morning newspaper, he discovers that he shot the wrong man. The return to the homeland is postponed, the assigned work must be completed at all costs. However, it won' t be that simple. The problems just keep piling up, the Croat has no money, no place to sleep, his gun is running out of bullets, and above all, the police, led by Harry Hole, are already on his trail. Harry faces a difficult task - to protect the real victim and catch the killer as soon as possible. To do this, he must resort to even more unconventional methods than usual.

" Nesbo manages to create tension that won' t allow the reader to tear themselves away from the narrator' s narrative. It' s not just about who the hitman is and who is responsible for the other murders. (. ) The ubiquitous image of the cruelty of the civil war in the Balkans, where the quirky criminal investigator Harry Hole goes to try to stop the murderer, is one of the enduring attributes of the prose image. "
- František Cinger, Law