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.
About the Author
Jo NesbØ is a musician, songwriter, economist, and author. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Glass Key, the Riverton Prize, and the Booksellers' Prize, and Norwegian readers voted one of his Harry Hole novels the best Norwegian crime novel of all time. He lives in Oslo.
Industry Reviews
Praise for Jo Nesb� and The Snowman "Jo Nesb� is my new favorite thriller writer and Harry Hole my new hero." --Michael Connelly
"Fiendishly complex and terrifically entertaining." --The New York Times Book Review
"If you don't know Nesb�, it's time to get with it." --USA Today
"Nesb� explores the darkest criminal minds with grim delight and puts his killers where you least expect to find them. . . . His novels are maddeningly addictive." --Vanity Fair
"A superb thriller--smart, stylish, beautifully paced and meticulously plotted." --Newsday
"The Snowman is strung together with great care, playful in certain stretches, grisly in others, all of it highly readable."--Newsweek
"The writer most likely to take the ice-cold crown in the critically acclaimed--and now bestselling--category of Nordic noir." --Los Angeles Times
"Nesb�'s books have a serious, socially significant heft, as well as a confident (even cocky) narrative stride that is unmatched. These aren't mere investigatory trifles to be enjoyed and forgotten; their unnerving horrors linger." --Richmond Times-Dispatch
"Nesb�'s pace is unerring, and the way he builds up suspense will incite Pavlovian page-turning." --Time Out New York
"This is reading as you experienced it in childhood, without any gap between eye and mind, but with the added pleasures that adult plots and adult characters can bring. . . . Unputdownable. The Snowman is probably the most terrifying and certainly the most addictive book in the whole series." --Slate
"This is crime writing of the highest order, in which the characters are as strong as the story, where an atmosphere of evil permeates, and the tension begins in the first chapter and never lets up." --The Times (London)
"Spine-chilling. . . . This most ambitious of Nesb�'s crime novels banishes any fears that the omniscient serial killer scenario has been exhausted." --The Independent (London)
"Macabre and disturbing. . . . Deft plotting, strong characterization, adrenaline-fuelled action sequences and a whole raft of social issues raised along the way make this book a spectacularly good example of how a tried and tested (and often tired) formula can be made exhilarating and fresh." --The Guardian (London)
"Hole is all a fictional detective should be." --Times Literary Supplement
"If you're still grieving the loss of Stieg Larsson, it's time to move on. Nesb�'s waiting for you." --Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
