The Snowman

Internationally acclaimed, best-selling Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø appears on the Knopf list for the first time with a bone-chilling new thriller about a serial killer who takes Harry Hole—Nesbø’s irascible police investigator— to the brink of insanity. The first snow of the season has fallen in Oslo. A boy named Jonas wakes in the night to find his mother gone. Outside he sees the snowman, bathed in cold moonlight, that inexplicably appeared in the yard that day—his mother’s pink scarf around its neck. Hole suspects there is a link to a menacing letter he recently received. And as the number of missing women grows, it becomes more and more clear that he is a pawn in a terrifying game whose rules are devised—and constantly revised—by the killer. Fiercely suspenseful, its characters brilliantly realized, its atmosphere steeped in evil, The Snowman is the work of one of the best crime writers of our time.