The Snowman

The Snowman is a crime novel by the Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo, published in 2007. It is the seventh book in his series about the Oslo police inspector Harry Hole.

The first snow of winter falls on Oslo, and a small boy wakes to find that his mother is not in the house. In the garden stands a snowman that somebody built overnight, wearing her scarf.

Hole has been sent a letter months earlier that he could make nothing of, and with the disappearance he begins to treat it as the work of a man who has done this before. The book follows the investigation as more people go missing and the pattern around the snowmen becomes clearer, while Hole deals with his own colleagues and with a journalist who is following the story.

Nesbo writes the series with Hole as a damaged and difficult investigator, and the Oslo setting and its weather are part of the atmosphere. The Snowman is a self-contained case, although it continues the lives of characters from the earlier books.