What Amazon says:

“The night the first snow falls a young boy wakes to find his mother gone. He walks through the silent house, but finds only wet footprints on the stairs. In the garden looms a solitary figure: a snowman bathed in cold moonlight, its black eyes glaring up at the bedroom windows. Round its neck is his mother’s pink scarf. Inspector Harry Hole is convinced there is a link between the disappearance and a menacing letter he received some months earlier. As Harry and his team delve into unsolved case files, they discover that an alarming number of wives and mothers have gone missing over the years. When a second woman disappears Harry’s suspicions are confirmed: he is a pawn in a deadly game. For the first time in his career Harry finds himself confronted with a serial killer operating on his turf, a killer who will drive him to the brink of insanity. A brilliant thriller with a pace that never lets up, “The Snowman” confirms Jo Nesbo’s position as an international star of crime fiction.”

What I thought:

What a blast this book was! I loved every minute and every page. When I won this book through BookRabbit I was so excited as I had already heard a bit of buzz generating around it and I do love a good whodunnit especially when combined with a rugged, loner Detective! I think Scandanavian crime novels are enjoying quite a bit of limelight at the moment and I did love Stieg Larssons books so I was very curious about this one too. Well, I picked it up last week to have a scan through and before I knew it I had read the first three chapters without pausing for breath. It was fantastic!

The book starts in 1980 with a young child being made to wait in the car for his Mother as she says she needs to pop into someones house for 10 minutes. When the Mother returns to the car 40 minutes later (scared, as she is sure that she saw someones face at the window) she finds her child in a state of fear and confusion saying that he “had seen him”. When his mother asks who, he can only reply “The Snowman”.

Fast forward twenty-four years, Oslo Detective Harry Hole (said rugged Detective) is investigating the disappearance of several women who all share the fact of being married with at least one child. He is assigned a new partner, the very pretty but aloof Katrine Bratt, and the two of them set about trying to find the connection between the women who have disappeared and the only thing that seems to connect them all is that there is a snowman at the scene of every disappearance and the women have all vanished every year on the first day of snowfall. Not only that, but Harry feels he is being watched. He received a mysterious note claiming to be from The Snowman and inviting him to find out who he is. Harry and Katrine then find out that a Detective in Bergen, who also appears to have been investigating the case, disappeared 14 years ago and has never been seen since.

As Harry Hole starts to fit all the pieces together, it is clear that there is more to the case than meets the eye. With a smattering of red herrings and mistaken identities you start to suspect everyone who graces the pages of this book. There is, of course, the obligatory nail-biting climax to the book when everything comes together all at once, and the old race-against-the-clock, will he / won’t he make it in time. I love that though; the edge-of-your-seet stuff.

The whole book, for me, pacey and gritty and just not wanting to put the damn thing down. If you enjoy crime / thrillers / whodunnits then you will LOVE this! I am over the moon that I have found a new author who has four other books that I am excited now to seek out (all in the Harry Hole series, yay!).

Massive thumbs up!!!