1.85k reviews for:

Le bonhomme de neige

Jo Nesbø

3.81 AVERAGE

adventurous dark mysterious tense fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Loved it! Can't wait to see the movie!

I enjoyed this book. I certainly wouldn't compare Nesbo to Larsson, but it did the job just fine. The story was good, but I felt all the plot twists and character build ups were quite obvious from the beginning, in summary, it's like a good Iain Rankin

Scary

Endlich!! :D

Po tomto už naplno verím, že severské veci neboli vyrobené pre mňa :) #checkdone #zapotvrdzujucuvynimkujetucamilla
Jaj, a aby som nezabudla - od Strečna sa valí hmla..
dark mysterious tense fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes

Surprise: The detective is a divorced, world-weary alcoholic and the crime-writer name checks a rock band every 20 pages or so. It was alright I guess, I finished it anyway, but I’m no better off for having read it.
slow-paced

A year or so back, one of my neighbours had books thrown out onto the curb, so I did what any book worm does and saved the books. 

Up until this book, i didn't know the snowman was a movie and haven't seen it. Maybe this book can convince me. 

The story is set between the 90s and early 2000s, in Norway where woman suddenly disappeared. Thought of the course of 30 odd years, they've had stacks of missing persons cause but none that turned into a serial killer realisation. 

The first 92 pages are okay. In my defence I started reading this at 5.30am after just under 5hrs sleep and on my way to the airport. So my mind wasn't in the mood to hold attention. 

Even though my brain wasn't in the mood to brain. It was a bit of a struggle for me to understand the time jumps and shift of POVs for each scene. 

I kept trying to work my way through this story but I struggled a lot. The scene changes confused me from having a convo on the phone to suddenly touching each other in a room. The character descriptions almost felt too vague to try to follow who was who. 

Even as the true killer was revealed, using the childhood/back story felt confusing to read. 

I lost track of each character and as I continued the male characters all sounded similar to each other. 

Expand filter menu Content Warnings


I got The Snowman for Christmas from my Other Half, along with a few other books. The Snowman is the 7th book in the series featuring Norwegian police detective Harry Hole. I’d previously read The Leopard, which is the 8th in the series – word of advice….if you haven’t read any of the Harry Hole series & do intend to start, don’t start with the Leopard, cause then you’ll know who the killer is in The Snowman. So, yeah, unfortunately I knew who the killer was, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of The Snowman.



The Snowman sees Oslo confronting the possibility that they are confronting a serial killer – their first ever. Unfortunately for the Oslo police the only person who is up to the task, the only person in Norway who has ever dealt with a serial killer is the brilliant but alcoholic Harry Hole. Can Harry convince his superiors in time that Norway is dealing with it’s first serial killer? Can Harry banish his demons long enough to solve the case & capture the killer, or will they get the better of him? How many women will the Snowman take?


I love what I affectionately call “Murder, Mystery, Mayhem” books & in my estimation Jo Nesbo ranks right up there with the best of them! For some reason his publishing house insists on referring to Nesbo as “The Next Steig Larsson” – if I was Nesbo, I would be really hacked off about that. Yes, they are (were?) Scandinavian authors, yes, they both write (wrote) mystery novels, but that really is where the similarity ends. I don’t think the Steig Larsson reference does Nesbo any favours.

I have read a lot of reviews where people have complained about the lack of character development & they are right, but this is a series of novels where really only the main character gets developed, the rest is peripheral & unnecessary. It also seems to me to be a style which is typical of Scandinavian writers. Well also of other mystery writers, too. Especially ones who write series which feature the same main character(s). Others have complained about the difficulty in reading the books, that they seem clunky, poorly translated. I personally do not think that the 2 Nesbo examples I have read were either of this, but maybe this is because I love Scandinavian writing? Not sure. I do think some of the complaints are due to the unfamiliarity of certain words/places, not knowing how to pronounce place names, character names, etc., and while that is understandable surely you should expect that a book set in a foreign country to the one where you are will have names/words which are “different”, no?

I do have one complaint about The Snowman, but it is a complaint that was caused by my own stupidity! I dove in head-fist into The Snowman, with zero regard for chapter numbers, or anything else that might be written at the top of the page. Yeah, don’t do that! As a result, I ended up pretty confused after about 4 or 5 chapters, because I didn’t realise that the book started in the past, then switched to the present. I loved The Snowman – flew through it, all 576 pages, in two days & I can’t wait to get my hands on the rest of the books in the series.