What is The Snowman about?

Detective Harry Hole of the Oslo Police is drawn to a series of disappearances connected by one detail: a snowman appears outside each woman's home before she vanishes. Women who leave their families, women with complicated domestic lives — someone has decided they deserve to disappear. Harry, who is himself a self-destructive alcoholic with a fractured relationship to the son who is not biologically his, pursues the case with the specific focus that other cases can't reliably produce in him. The Snowman is Nesbø's most structurally ambitious Harry Hole novel and the one that gave the series its widest international audience.

The book works on two registers simultaneously. On the surface it is a serial killer thriller with an unusually patient predator and a protagonist who barely holds himself together long enough to catch him. Below the surface it is a novel about paternity — biological and chosen, present and absent — and what men who feel they have failed their children will do to escape that knowledge. Harry's relationship to his partner Rakel's son Oleg is the emotional spine of the series, and it is under particular pressure here.

Nesbø writes in the Nordic noir tradition but is less interested than Larsson in institutional critique or social commentary. His subject is individual psychology — specifically the psychology of men who are genuinely good at one thing and genuinely destructive about everything else. Harry is not a broken man who is brilliant despite his damage; he is a man whose damage and brilliance are the same thing. The investigation requires the same intensity that makes him impossible to live with.

This is the seventh Harry Hole novel and works better with the series context than as an entry point, though Nesbø provides enough background to get a newcomer oriented. The plotting is intricate and Nesbø plays fair with the clues. The reveal is genuinely surprising. A 2017 film adaptation starring Michael Fassbender has significant differences from the novel and is widely considered inferior. The book is what to read.