Sounds like something from a movie.

Jo Nesbo's Headhunters

(2011)

A corporate headhunter moonlights as an art thief is the unlikely premise for this Nordic offering. The result is an economically told thriller that marries pitch black comedy with edge of the seat tension. The premise is batty enough, before events start escalating out of Roger Brown's control when he discovers he picked the wrong person to steal from. Askel Hennie plays the slippery little (his size is remarked upon several times) bastard you can't help rooting for, and his boggle-eyed amazement at each successive event worsening his predicament is one the film's greatest assets.

Game of Thrones' Nikolay Coster-Waldau only really needs to show up and look alternately cool and threatening as his nemesis. The tale is fairly shameless in its house of cards structure, and would likely blow away under analysis of the coincidences that need to play out for the various parties' plans to work (including a conclusion so tidy it could only happen in the movies/page-turners).

I'm not sure Jo Nesbo is prolific enough that he deserves his name before the title, and director Morten Tyldum deserves much of the credit for how lean and stylish this is. Any film that features its protagonist, covered from head to toe in shit, driving a tractor full pelt down a road with a bulldog impailed on one of its forks, is worth 100 minutes of your time.

****

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