{"id":1229,"date":"2013-12-29T22:57:15","date_gmt":"2013-12-30T04:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1229"},"modified":"2013-12-29T22:57:15","modified_gmt":"2013-12-30T04:57:15","slug":"jo-nesbo-the-snowman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/jo-nesbo-the-snowman\/","title":{"rendered":"Jo Nesbo: The Snowman"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I had a bad reaction to the first Jo Nesbo title I tried, The Redbreast<\/i>, and set him aside as unreadable, despite many enthusiastic customers\u2019 responses to the contrary.\u00a0 Finally a few women in my book club recommended that I give The Snowman<\/i> a try.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad I did.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>It\u2019s hard to mess up a serial killer book, which this one is, but there are so many variations, that it\u2019s also hard to be original in the particular sub-genre.\u00a0 Nesbo more than pulls it off, writing a complex, intelligent, twisty and emotionally penetrating thriller that\u2019s very difficult to put down.\u00a0 This is the seventh book in Nesbo\u2019s Harry Hole series.\u00a0 Harry is a Swedish police detective whose spiritual twins might be Ian Rankin\u2019s John Rebus and Henning Mankell\u2019s Kurt Wallander.\u00a0 He\u2019s a tad cranky, he used to drink, his relationships are problematic, and he\u2019s obsessed with the job, as well as being a very good detective.\u00a0 He needs all his smarts to catch the serial killer dubbed \u201cThe Snowman.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though as a reader you know this is a serial killer novel, Nesbo has many threads and cases and moreover jumps about in time a bit, so that while you know intellectually that all the deaths are connected, it\u2019s a puzzle trying to figure out exactly how they might be.\u00a0 Starting as a straightforward investigation of the disappearance of an apparently responsible wife and mother \u2013 who has left her 10-year-old son home alone \u2013 the only tangible clue is a snowman built mysteriously in the woman\u2019s front yard.\u00a0 For some reason, it\u2019s facing the house.<\/p>\n

Hole has been assigned a new recruit, an eager and intense young woman named Katrina Bratt, and the two of them are soon hot on the trail of a number of mysterious disappearances of young mothers.\u00a0 The serial killer idea is scoffed at by Harry\u2019s superior officers, who think that he got ideas over in the USA when he was taking a criminology class at Quantico.\u00a0 Bratt believes in him totally though he has some slight doubts about her, but she\u2019s a good officer who is with him as they make some chilling and disturbing finds.<\/p>\n

What makes this novel especially original apart from its structure is the really ominous sense of doom that Nesbo manages to inject into an innocent snowman.\u00a0 I was reminded of the sequence in \u201cGhostbusters\u201d when Dan Aykroyd imagines the least threatening thing possible, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.\u00a0 And, like the Marshmallow man, who could be afraid of a snowman?\u00a0 Nesbo pulls it off, as he does this complex, dark take on the serial killer trope.\u00a0 I am now more than willing to revisit Harry Hole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had a bad reaction to the first Jo Nesbo title I tried, The Redbreast, and set him aside as unreadable, despite many enthusiastic customers\u2019 responses to the contrary.\u00a0 Finally a few women in my book club recommended that I give The Snowman a try.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad I did. It\u2019s hard to mess up a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-1229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1229"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1231,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1229\/revisions\/1231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}