Book Review: The Snowman

The Snowman

~Jo Nesbo

What makes a great crime-fiction thriller? A solid plot, mind-boggling twists, a spine-chilling narrative and an edge-of-the-seat climax. Jo Nesbo’s ‘The Snowman’ rates 7 on 10 on those parameters, and 9.5 if judged only on the first.

One fine morning 10-year-old Jason finds a snowman in his garden. While his mother compliments him for making the “big snowman”, he wonders why it is facing the house and not the road. The same night, his mother disappears, and her scarf is found tied around the snowman’s neck.

Inspector Harry Hole believes that there is more to the case than simply a missing person. As Harry looks deeper in the case, he discovers that a startling number of married women, who had kids, had gone missing without a trace over the last decade. The serial killer had taken one victim a year, each on the first day of the snow. And then, another woman disappears, except this time, her head is found atop a snowman built in the woods near her house. Why is the killer changing patterns now and killing more often? And, why has the snowman started leaving body parts behind? Are the victims random? What is that connects them?

The search for the snowman takes Harry and his colleague Katrine Bratt to Bergen, the scene of the first crime. Eleven years ago, Laila Aasen was murdered; her body cut in so many tiny pieces that it was difficult for the police to even determine the gender. The inspector in-charge then was Gert Rafto, who was, Harry thought, his “spiritual doppelganger”. Rafto had interrogated Laila’s friend Onny Hetland, right before she disappeared. Rafto, himself, was the next one to vanish. The Bergen police believe that Rafto murdered Laila and Onny, and then committed suicide. Is that true? What’s the connection between Rafto and the snowman?

As Harry untwines mangled clues, he feels that the killer has something personal against him, and is somehow keeping an eye on him. Another woman dies, and the snowman slips from Harry’s fingers yet again. If Harry doesn’t stop the snowman soon, he would strike again, and this time, the stakes may be much higher.

‘The Snowman’ is the seventh Harry Hole novel. There are some references to cases and characters of the previous books, but they are not integral to the plot. Nesbo’s narrative is racy and bound to keep you hooked right until the nail-biting climax. Ardent crime-fiction fans may be able to guess the killer in the first half of the book. However, the true mark of the book lies in its plot, which is well laid, to say the least.

While the story finds strength in its plot, it loses some with the apparent twists (SPOILER ALERT: for example, why would Nesbo try to show a woman as the snowman, when in two previous chapters he made it clear that the killer was a man). The book has a dash of macabre, several good action sequences, and a few memorable characters. All in all, it’s a great read.