The Bat

The first novel in Jo Nesbø's long-running Inspector Harry Hole series, the story follows Harry Hole, a detective from the Oslo Crime Squad, as he travels to Sydney, Australia, to assist with the investigation of a murdered Norwegian citizen. At the airport, Andrew Kensington, an Aboriginal officer with the Sydney police, meets Harry and drives him to a hotel in King's Cross, Sydney's red-light district. Neil McCormack, the Head of the Crime Squad for Surry Hills, briefs Harry on the victim: Inger Holter, a 23-year-old Norwegian woman found by fishermen at a clifftop park, semi-naked, raped, strangled, and mutilated, her body washed clean by seawater and yielding almost no forensic evidence. McCormack makes clear that Harry's role is strictly observational and that political pressures, including the approaching 2000 Olympics, demand a swift resolution.

Harry and Andrew visit Inger's rented room in the Sydney suburb of Glebe, where Harry finds an unfinished letter revealing she had a new boyfriend named Evans, a 32-year-old drifter with a young son, and that the manager at the bar where she worked had been pursuing her with unwanted attention. Andrew introduces Harry to Otto Rechtnagel, a flamboyant gay clown performing at a local museum and an old friend of Andrew's. That evening, at the Albury, a lively bar in Oxford Street where Inger worked, Harry meets Birgitta Enquist, a Swedish barmaid with long red hair who offers limited information about Inger. Harry impulsively asks Birgitta to dinner, and she accepts.

The investigative team identifies Inger's boyfriend as Evans White, a small-time drug dealer based in Nimbin, a counterculture town in New South Wales. Harry and Andrew travel there and confront White, who describes Inger dismissively but shows genuine emotion about her death. White claims he was with a woman named Angelina Hutchinson at the time of the murder. Further investigation reveals that Inger had threatened to tell Hutchinson what kind of man White was, suggesting a volatile love triangle, but a contact of Andrew's later claims to have seen White in Nimbin on the day of the murder, effectively clearing him.

Meanwhile, Harry and Birgitta grow close. Over dinner and subsequent nights together, Harry reveals fragments of his past: his mother's death, his sister who has Down syndrome, and his solitary life in Oslo. He confides his deepest secret: He is an alcoholic whose drunk driving killed his colleague Ronny Stiansen and left a young driver in another car paralyzed. His superiors covered up the truth, publicly attributing the driving to the dead Stiansen, and Harry received a commendation for being injured on duty. The guilt drove him to quit drinking as self-punishment. Birgitta, whose own father is an alcoholic, tells Harry she recognized his condition from the moment they met.

At a team meeting, Yong Sue, a young officer on the investigative unit, presents disturbing findings: A search of unsolved cases across Australia reveals a disproportionate number of blonde victims aged 16 to 35 who were strangled, spread across multiple states over several years. The pattern suggests a serial killer whose geographical mobility prevented any single jurisdiction from recognizing the connection. Andrew argues that for this perpetrator, rape is paramount and killing occurs only when a victim can identify him. Separately, Andrew introduces Harry to Robin "The Murri" Toowoomba, a talented Aboriginal boxer whose nickname derives from Murri, a term for Aboriginal people from Queensland. Toowoomba travels with the Jim Chivers Boxing Team, a traveling outfit where local men challenge professional fighters. He and Andrew share a deep, familial bond, as Andrew mentored him through boxing as a youth.

The case against White collapses, and events accelerate. At a show by Otto's circus troupe at St. George's Theatre on Bondi Beach, Harry and the unit leader, Larry Watkins, plan to arrest Otto, having matched the troupe's travel itinerary to the crime scene locations. But during the second act, Otto is murdered in the props room, dismembered with the show's own guillotine. The killer escapes out the back door wearing a bat costume from the production, seen by officers stationed outside but not stopped. Andrew, meanwhile, has fled the hospital, where he was recovering from injuries sustained in an earlier bar fight.

Harry and the detective Sergey Lebie find Andrew's body hanging from a ceiling cable in Otto's flat, an apparent suicide. Harry weeps openly. The autopsy reveals Andrew's body was full of heroin, and Harry discovers needle marks hidden on the backs of Andrew's legs, confirming a long-concealed addiction. McCormack instructs Harry to keep everything quiet: The official story will be that Otto killed Inger, and Otto's own murder was a crime of passion. Harry is told to fly home.

Instead, Harry breaks. He orders his first drink since the accident and spirals into a multi-day bender. He sleeps with Sandra, a prostitute he met during the investigation, and when Birgitta arrives at his hotel unexpectedly and finds him with Sandra, she leaves devastated. During his binge, Harry catches a news report: Another blonde woman has been found raped and strangled. The serial killer is still active. Sheltered by Joseph, a perceptive Aboriginal man from the Crow people whom Harry befriended in Green Park, Harry forces himself back to work.

A crucial insight breaks the case. The light was off in Otto's flat when they found Andrew's body, yet the flat is pitch-black at night. A burn mark on Andrew's shirt from the lightbulb proves the light was on while Andrew hung there; someone else turned it off upon leaving, the way a person does when exiting a familiar flat. The cable was wiped clean of fingerprints, and no syringe was found at the scene. Andrew was murdered. After Andrew's funeral, Jim Connolly, an old boxing colleague of Andrew's, mentions that his wife's circus troupe traveled with the Jim Chivers boxers as part of the same fair. Harry has Yong cross-reference the itineraries and confirms Toowoomba was present at or near every crime scene on the relevant dates. Toowoomba was also Otto's secret lover, the one with keys to the flat, and the person Andrew could never bring himself to arrest because he loved Toowoomba like a son.

Harry asks Birgitta to serve as bait in a sting operation ostensibly targeting White. She agrees, but while walking through Green Park at night en route to the meeting point, she is intercepted and kidnapped. Toowoomba calls Harry, revealing he drugged Birgitta with ether, and demands Harry frame White for the murders within 48 hours or Birgitta will die. In a subsequent call, Toowoomba explains his delusional motivation: He applies the colonial doctrine of Terra Nullius, which held that unoccupied land belongs to no one, to childless white women, viewing his crimes as vengeance for Aboriginal dispossession. He acknowledges his own psychopathy with detached clarity. The team finds Birgitta's body tied to the anchor rope of Toowoomba's boat at a marina. Harry is paralyzed with grief.

Using mobile phone base-station tracking, the team traces Toowoomba to Sydney Aquarium in Darling Harbour. In a raging storm, Harry pursues Toowoomba through the building, vaulting over the barrier of a saltwater crocodile enclosure and barely outrunning the lunging animal. Toowoomba strikes Harry from the darkness and flees onto the roof. Harry, with a dislocated shoulder, chases him to the open tanks and fires three shots from a pontoon, hitting Toowoomba in the leg. Toowoomba falls into the water, where the aquarium's great white shark attacks and kills him. No body remains for an autopsy.

In the aftermath, Harry gets a rose tattoo as a private memorial. He then goes skydiving with Joseph, who despite usually being drunk and having lost his instructor's license arranges a jump from a police Cessna. During the free fall from 10,000 feet, Harry reflects on Kristin, a former girlfriend who took her own life, and affirms his own stubborn will to live. At 4,000 feet, he pulls the rip cord and begins to count, the novel ending in mid-descent as he waits for the parachute to open.