The Snowman

All the twists and turns in the plot gave me whiplash, which was very entertaining, but in the end this was just too much of everything. It felt like this book was just cobbled together with well-used tropes and obvious plot devices from similar thrillers. The two concluding action sequences were just over-the-top ridiculous to me, which made me like the book less.

If you know your way around Oslo, or love the phrase "to ring off", you may enjoy this more than I did. Plus, the detective's name is "Harry Hole", so the book gave me a good chuckle on every page.

I came to this book after reading [b:The Leopard|625094|The Leopard|Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176424490s/625094.jpg|1132275] by the same author, which I found disappointing. My wife bought it, and I wasn't particularly keen to read it, as I thought it might be similarly disappointing, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was vintage [a:Jo Nesbø|904719|Jo Nesbø|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1229353244p2/904719.jpg], except perhaps for the last couple of chapters.

Oslo detective Harry Hole is asked to investigate the case of a missing woman with his new partner Katrine Bratt, who urges him to check older unsolved cases in Bergen that seem to have some similarities. When a second missing woman is found murdered, it seems that a serial killer may be at work.

Towards the end, however, the story shows the same descent into the improbable that characterises [b:The Leopard|625094|The Leopard|Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1176424490s/625094.jpg|1132275] throughout, and the figure of the boozy Scandiwegian detective seems well on its way to becoming a literary cliche. Perhaps this is because Nesbø's publishers have taken to hyping him as "the next [a:Stieg Larsson|706255|Stieg Larsson|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1246466225p2/706255.jpg]", which is a pity, because Nesbø writes better as Nesbø than as a faux Stieg Larsson.