Midnight Sun: A novel

The internationally acclaimed author of Blood on Snow and the Harry Hole novels now gives us the tightly wound tale of a man running from retribution, a renegade hitman who goes to ground far above the Arctic circle, where the never-setting sun might slowly drive a man insane.

He calls himself Ulf as good a name as any, he thinks and the only thing he s looking for is a place where he won t be found by Oslo s most notorious drug lord: the Fisherman. He was once the Fisherman s fixer, but after betraying him, Ulf is now the one his former boss needs fixed which may not be a problem for a man whose criminal reach is boundless. When Ulf gets off the bus in K sund, on Norway s far northeastern border, he sees a flat, monotonous, bleak landscape . . . the perfect hiding place. Hopefully.

The locals native Sami and followers of a particularly harsh Swedish version of Christianity seem to accept Ulf s explanation that he s come to hunt, even if he has no gun and the season has yet to start. And a bereaved, taciturn woman and her curious, talkative young son supply him with food, the use of a cabin deep in the woods, a weapon and companionship that stirs something in him he thought was long dead.

But the agonizing wait for the inevitable moment when the Fisherman s henchmen will show the midnight sun hanging in the sky like an unblinking, all-revealing eye forces him to question if redemption is at all possible or if, as he s always believed, hope is a real bastard.