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Overview
One night, after the first snowfall of the year, a boy named Jonas wakes up and discovers that his mother has disappeared. Only one trace of her remains: a pink scarf, his Christmas gift to her, now worn by the snowman that inexplicably appeared in their yard earlier that day. Inspector Harry Hole suspects a link between the missing woman and a suspicious letter he’s received. The case deepens when a pattern emerges: over the past decade, eleven women have vanished—all on the day of the first snow. But this is a killer who makes his own rules . . . and he’ll break his pattern just to keep the game interesting, as he draws Harry ever closer into his twisted web. With brilliantly realized characters and hair-raising suspense, international bestselling author Jo Nesbø presents his most chilling case yet—one that will test Harry Hole to the very limits of his sanity.
Editorials
Marilyn Stasio
…a fiendishly complex and terrifically entertaining plot…Nesbo has a horrormeister's flair for transforming natural scenes into ominous situations…—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
In this chilling installment in Nesbø's Insp. Harry Hole crime series (The Devil's Star, etc.), a snowman left in the front yard of Birte Becker's Oslo house is the only clue to the woman's disappearance. When Sylvia Ottersen disappears from her farmhouse soon afterward, the snowman the killer leaves behind has a gruesome addition: Sylvia's severed head. Harry, aided by Katrine Bratt, a brash new member of his team with secrets of her own, combs through past missing person cases, looking for other victims of the killer now dubbed the Snowman. Several months earlier, Harry received an anonymous letter referring to both snowmen and the Australian serial killer he'd pursued early in his career. What appeared random and bizarre then now takes on new meaning as Harry realizes the killer is taunting him. Nesbø breathes new life into the serial killer subgenre, giving it a Norwegian twist and never losing his laconic hero in the process. 150,000 first printing; 6-city author tour. (May)Library Journal
Norwegian detective Harry Hole is in a quandary—he's an expert on serial killers in a country that prides itself on not having any. Yet women are being murdered on the day of the first snowfall, their bodies enmeshed with or guarded by eerily watchful snowmen. Hole has to convince his peers that the murders are the work of a serial killer, so he tracks The Snowman. But soon questions arise—who is stalking whom? And for what purpose? Nesbø (The Devil's Star; Nemesis; The Redbreast) is also a musician and composer. His latest thriller reads like a symphony, from the thundering first chords that pull the reader into a magical world through the delicately enticing development in which motifs and story strands are woven together leading to a pounding, furious conclusion. VERDICT Nesbø is being hailed as the next Stieg Larsson or Henning Mankell; this work is being compared to Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow, among others. Apt comparisons, but they don't go far enough. This is simply the best detective novel this reviewer has read in years. [See Prepub Alert, 11/1/10; 150,000-copy first printing; six-city tour.]—David Clendinning, West Virginia State Univ. Lib., InstituteKirkus Reviews
Erica Jong meets Stephen King meets, yes, Stieg Larsson in this superb thriller, the eighth by Norwegian mystery writer Nesbø.
Oslo detective Harry Hole returns, world-weary as ever, to puzzle out some very strange, and very discomfiting, events. The opening is very Scandinavian indeed: two people not married to each other are experiencing some extracurricular bliss—the Erica Jong part—when one notices that they're being watched, whereupon the woman's kid, waiting in a car in the wintry outside—the Scandinavian part—informs his mom, "We're going to die"—and not just because Ronald Reagan has just been elected. The thing is, it's a snowman that's doing the watching, and from that fact no good thing can emerge. Nesbø is to be complimented: It's one of the creepiest opening scenes in recent memory, even if the lovemaking has a sort of late-1970s West German soft-porn feel to it. Fast-forward 24 years, when the Norwegians are worried about Dubya, and Hole is on the case of more snowman hijinks, helped along by his fellow officers of the Politioverbetjent (the Crime Squad, that is), one of whom is "attractive without trying" and makes a fine lure for mayhem. Things get creepier as the scene shifts from substation to plastic surgeon's office to coroner's gurney, when Harry announces, "I just have the feeling that someone is watching me the whole time, that someone is watching me now. I'm part of someone's plan." So he is, and the story resolves with a nice edgy twist that would do Larsson proud. Harry is pleasingly human, with a capacity for hard, grueling work being one of his best features, and the rest of the characters say and do believable things, the murderous snowman notwithstanding. The Norwegian settings are sometimes exotic, sometimes just grimy—who knew that Oslo had a high-crime area?—but always appropriate to the story, which unfolds at just the right pace.
The smart, suspenseful cat-and-mouse game will remind some readers of Erik Skjoldbjærg's 1997 filmInsomnia—and that's high praise indeed.