The Snowman - Jo Nesbo

 

This is the seventh book in the Harry Hole series and follows the detective as he starts to link together murders from the past decade.  The murders all happen on the day of the first snow every year and there's a mysterious snowman left where the women were taken. Detective Harry Hole suspects there is a link between the most recent abducted woman and a mysterious letter he'd received prior.  Following an investigation that spans years and multiple areas of Norway, Hole and his team may finally uncover the identity of this serial killer who may be closer than they realize.  

While this is the seventh book in the series, I hadn't read any of the prior novels.  I'd heard multiple times that this is really the shining star of the series and seems to be pretty unanimously the one to start with.  Like most detective series, the case is introduced, investigated, and solved all in this one book but there are larger plot arcs and character relationships that span the series.  I thought Nesbo did a good job giving the reader a quick run-down of these past relationships at the beginning of this book so I didn't feel lost or confused.  However, there is an obvious difference in emotional investment when you start with a book in the middle of a series.  There were 2 characters in this book that Hole had long established relationships with and I could tell that the scenes with these characters throughout the book would have had more emotional impact if I had actually read the previous books and seen those relationships grow and change for myself.  I had to take it at face value that "Harry cares about X because of A, B, and C they went through together" which did lower my overall investment in Harry as a character. 

The structure of this novel was a little odd at first but I think it paid off really well at the end.  In the first 1/4 of the book, we are skipping around a good amount in time and we see a few of these Snowman abduction/murders.  We also see a different detective seemingly track down the killer at one point, but then he disappears. These flashbacks didn't have anything immediately apparent to do with the main plot line with Harry so they did make the narrative feel a bit disconnected for me. For example, in many detective mystery/thrillers our main detective would be reading the case notes of an old murder and then the next chapter we would flashback to that time in order to 'read' the case notes along with the detective.  In the case of The Snowman, there isn't that type of link to the main plot and, as a result, they did take me out of the story a bit while I was reading.  Thankfully, those exact flashback plots come back in the ending and we can piece them all together and see how important they really were to the story.  

I do wish we'd seen a bit more of the Snowman during the point of the investigation.  The synopsis had a line that stated the killer would be constantly changing the rules on Harry so I was expecting more of a cat-and-mouse sort of plot.  What we got was instead a pretty standard detective plot which I still really enjoyed.  I was really intrigued by the one chapter we did get where we directly saw the Snowman in action and I do wished we had gotten more of those scenes.  I found the tension to be a little low since the Snowman only kills 1 person per year so, in theory, Harry would have a whole year to solve the murder before another body drops.  There are multiple situations that do manage to increase the tension and suspense in the book but it took a while to build the tension to the level that many other serial killer books start out with.  This book is around 500 pages long and I feel like it took about the first 150 pages to really sink into the story and be excited about following Harry while he investigates.  Five hundred pages is long for a mystery/thriller so I could see how this longer lead up and tension building would lose some readers before they got into the real meat of the story.  

The twists in this book were fantastic - the last 150 pages especially were a hell of a ride.  Since this was a detective mystery/thriller, we're putting the pieces together alongside Harry so I found myself pretty convinced that person A was the killer.  But that certainty was time and time again shown to be incorrect and then a new suspect would emerge who I would be even more convinced was the killer (and again, that belief would be shown incorrect).  It got to the point at the end where I didn't trust that we had really found the true killer until the very last page.  I really enjoyed how all the suspects were really well fleshed out when it came to their characters and motives. It really made it so that each and every lead and suspect that we encountered during the novel really did feel plausible so I couldn't discount any of the suspects which made it a really fun read. 

Overall, I really enjoyed this detective mystery/thriller.  I can understand why this is such a highly recommended read.  I do wish the serial killer played a larger on-page role but the twists in the last 1/4 were really fantastic.