Derek B. Miller’s first novel, Norwegian by Night, both delights and satisfies, and in Sheldon “Donny” Horowitz, a Marine sniper in the Korean War turned Manhattan watch repairman, Miller has created a hero for the ages. Widowed, old, impatient, possibly demented, Sheldon has grudgingly agreed to move, with his granddaughter Rhea and her husband Lars, to Norway, “a country of blue and ice” and one thousand Jews, where “[h]e is among tall, homogeneous, acquainted, well-meaning, smiling people all dressed in the same transgenerational clothing, and no matter how hard he tries, he just can’t draw a bead on them.”

Home alone one morning, Sheldon shelters his upstairs neighbors, a Balkan woman and her young son, from an abusive stranger. When the dispute turns deadly, Sheldon hides the little boy from the violence, and the two “light out for the territories” pursued by Kosovar war criminals. As he and the child struggle to find safety, Sheldon relives his guilt over his only son’s death in Vietnam and resolves to protect the traumatized little boy whose name he does not know and whose language he does not speak.

Sheldon is so vivid that he eclipses Rhea and Lars, who seem almost transparent in their lack of depth. Rhea, in particular, is oddly detached, not only from Sheldon but from her own pain. The elite detective squad, headed by Sigrid and her deputy Petter, fares quite a bit better. In these two police officers, Miller vests intelligence, wit, perseverance and courage as they work the crime scene and search for Sheldon, the boy and the mysterious and brutal Enver.

Miller’s ear for dialogue is well tuned. Sheldon’s trenchant observations and total recall of his war experience are rendered in flawless Newyorkese, the searing pain perfectly understated. For example, he decides to call his traveling companion Paul in memory of his own son, Saul, named for the first king of Israel: “And then there was the other Saul — Rabbi Saul of Tarsus. A Roman. Liked to fall off horses. According to you Gentile types, he persecuted the early Christians until he had a revelation, a vision, on the road to Damascus. And so Saul became Paul. … What if I call you Paul? A boy transformed? The one who fell and got up again? The Christian reborn from the fallen Jew?” Paul, though he does not speak a word throughout the novel, appears to take this to heart: His disguise of choice is a long white tee shirt worn with a brown leather belt and topped off by a blond wig for which Sheldon fashions a Viking helmet out of a brown wool cap, a wire coat hanger, a paper-towel tube and some tinfoil.

Rookie mistakes are to be expected in a first novel: confusing and drawn-out exposition in the first chapter, for example; odd comparisons such as “Her blue eyes sparkle like the Sea of Japan before battle”; an ambiguous ending. Sometimes the reader can see Miller stretching for the smartass remark. Yet these are all cavils — this is a novel to be reckoned with.

For all its picaresque humor, Norwegian by Night is no lightweight. To describe it as a police thriller is like describing butter as animal fat: true, but it’s so much more. For its antecedent, we need look no further than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, whose ragtag adventurers face the wilds of the Mississippi pursued by slave traders. Where Twain’s theme was slavery and its legacy of racism, Miller’s is the unhealed wounds of the Second World War, compounded and reinflicted in Korea and Vietnam and the Middle East and reinvented for a new century in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

Although to call it an antiwar novel would be misleading, Norwegian by Night is fundamentally a novel about war and the penalties it exacts. Has Saul’s death unhinged Sheldon? Undoubtedly. Is he suffering from dementia? Not hardly. In his reminiscences, visions, hallucinations, whatever you want to call them, Sheldon confronts the ugly truth of his own actions that will destroy him if he relaxes his guard.

Derek B. Miller has produced as fine a first novel as one could ask for, full of compassion, love, humor, suffering and redemption. Read it. Discuss it. Anticipate his next one.

Mara T. Adams is a lifelong bibliophile, editor, writer and generally hard-to-please critic. She lives on Cape Cod.

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