|

Click here to expand and collapse the player

The SnowmanA Novel

Jo Nesbo

Rate It! Avg: 4.0 (2 ratings)

Summary

The Snowman

By: Jo Nesbo

Narrarated by: Robin Sachs

Internationally acclaimed crime writer Jo Nesbø’s antihero police investigator, Harry Hole, is back: in a bone-chilling thriller that will take Hole to the brink of insanity.

Oslo in November. The first snow of the season has fallen. A boy named Jonas wakes in the night to find his mother gone. Out his window, in the cold moonlight, he sees the snowman that inexplicably appeared in the yard earlier in the day. Around its neck is his mother’s pink scarf.

Hole suspects a link between a menacing letter he’s received and the disappearance of Jonas’s mother—and of perhaps a dozen other women, all of whom went missing on the day of a first snowfall. As his investigation deepens, something else emerges: he is becoming a pawn in an increasingly terrifying game whose rules are devised—and constantly revised—by the killer.

Fiercely suspenseful, its characters brilliantly realized, its atmosphere permeated with evil, The Snowman is the electrifying work of one of the best crime writers of our time.

Sample Audiobook
Audiobook Information
EDITOR'S PICK // New York Times Best Seller

Total File Size: 429 MB (13 files) Total Length: 15 Hours, 37 Minutes

eMusic Pick

eMusic Review 0

Avatar Image
Elizabeth Isadora Gold

eMusic Contributor

06.29.11
Jo Nesbo, The Snowman
2011 | Label: Random House Audio

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.

Write a Review 0 Member Reviews

Please register before you review a release. Register

Also By This Author