Jo Nesbo, The Snowman
Featured Book
Oslo’s most tortured detective solves a gruesome crime
The Snowman begins with some backstory. A little boy and his mother go to visit a mysterious house on a snowy day. Leaving her son locked in the freezing car, the mother goes inside to meet her lover for a final tryst. It’s all very creepy and Freudian; we see the scene from the perspective of both mother and son, and clearly, something is not right. Next, we go forward to (almost) present day Oslo, Norway. Harry Hole, the city’s most tortured detective, notices a pattern of disappearances — women with children, all on the day of the season’s first snow. Of course, a serial killer is on the loose, and his “calling card” would only be possible in a wintry land: a snowman, adorned and/or completed with some gruesome reminder of his victim. Hole is a classic noir detective, brilliant yet flawed, a bad drunk with a history of failed romances and run-ins with his police force superiors. But, like all such anti-heroes, he always gets his bad guy. There are too many twists to The Snowman‘s both sexually and forensically explicit plot to risk spoiling, but suffice to say, if you don’t enjoy gritting your teeth in squeamish fear, this is probably not the greatest listen for a dead-of-night road trip through the Yukon.
The Snowman is being marketed as the Next Big Thing out of the frozen north, although it’s actually the seventh Harry Hole book. While it’s not quite necessary to have read the earlier installments in the series, Hole’s character is by now rather the worse for wear. If you’d like to know why the detective is so emotionally and physically battered, as well as the roots of his alcoholism and beginning of his love affairs (especially with Rakel, his Snowman love interest), be sure to check out the earlier books, which are all now available in translation.
