“The Snowman” by Jo Nesbo – The First Snow Victims

In the very recent past Jo Nesbo has established himself as a very interesting mystery writer, especially with his penning of numerous Harry Hole novels.

He has brought us one solid murder thriller after the next, and with The Snowman he makes no exception. Being another Harry Hole novel, we now follow our beloved hero as he looks into a rather strange disappearance.

After the first snowfall, a boy woke up only to see his mother gone, with her only trace being her pink scarf tied around a snowman which seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. To make matters even more intriguing, Harry receives a mysterious letter, and quickly sees the pattern: for the past eleven years, a woman always disappeared on the first day of snow.

However, the serial killer Hole is chasing is a far cry from your average madman; being aware of himself and the game he is playing, he has no qualms with breaking his own rules to gain an advantage, or at least prevent things from going stale. As is always the case (so far at least) the story in The Snowman is very solid and put together with a lot of care and attention, even to the smallest details.

The first half of the book is basically dedicated to setting the various plotlines in motion, and in the second half they truly start developing, picking up, and eventually, intertwining. There are always superb and unpredictable plot twists and turns that will keep you guessing as to who the killer is, until the very end where all is revealed.

If there is one thing Jo Nesbo excels at, in my opinion, it is character development. He builds on the various things we have learned about Harry Hole from the past novels, not only giving us more information about him but actually forcing him to evolve as a human being, modifying him according to the experiences which must have surely shaped him.

In this book though, I believe that it is the killer who steals the show, and it doesn’t matter whether or not you can figure out who it is before the end.

The fact that the killer makes up his own rules as he goes along, the feeling that he does this for entertainment rather than a purpose is quite frightening for it gives life to an intelligent and yet quite insane character who is aware of what is going and is willing to stop at nothing.

It’s as if Harry Hole has come face-to-face with pure evil, one that knows what it is doing and cannot be reasoned with by anyone on this entire planet. One can only imagine how such an encounter will shape Harry Hole in the future.

All in all, The Snowman is another fantastic addition to Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole collection, giving us an entertaining story, a challenging mystery and a haunting villain. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to get to know the author or simply likes murder mystery novels.

---

Jo Nesbo Personal site Jo Nesbo is a Norwegian musician and book writer who has gained a solid foothold in his native country, selling more than 1.5 million copies of his novels in Norway (9 million worldwide) and having them translated in more than 40 languages. One of his more famous books is The Headhunters, on which a very successful 2011 film was based.