Snowman (Nesbo) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
A fiendishly complex and terrifically entertaining plot.... Nesbo has a horrormeister's flair for transforming natural scenes into ominous situations.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times


A superb thriller—smart, stylish, beautifully paced and meticulously plotted.
New York Newsday


This is crime writing of the highest order, in which the characters are as strong as the story, where an atmosphere of evil permeates, and the tension begins in the first chapter and never lets up.
London Times
 

Spine-chilling.... This most ambitious of Nesbo’s crime novels banishes any fears that the omniscient serial killer scenario has been exhausted.
Independent (UK)
 

Macabre and disturbing.... Deft plotting, strong characterization, adrenaline-fuelled action sequences and a whole raft of social issues raised along the way make this book a spectacularly good example of how a tried and tested (and often tired) formula can be made exhilarating and fresh.
Guardian (UK)


The writer most likely to take the ice-cold crown in the critically acclaimed—and now bestselling—category of Nordic noir.
Los Angeles Times
 

Nesbo's books have a serious, socially significant heft, as well as a confident (even cocky) narrative stride that is unmatched. These aren’t mere investigatory trifles to be enjoyed and forgotten; their unnerving horrors linger.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
 

Nesbo’s pace is unerring, and the way he builds up suspense will incite Pavlovian page-turning.
Time Out New York


The Snowman is strung together with great care, playful in certain stretches, grisly in others, all of it highly readable.
Newsweek


Nesbo explores the darkest criminal minds with grim delight and puts his killers where you least expect to find them.... His novels are maddeningly addictive.
Vanity Fair
 
 
This is reading as you experienced it in childhood, without any gap between eye and mind, but with the added pleasures that adult plots and adult characters can bring.... Unputdownable. The Snowman is probably the most terrifying and certainly the most addictive book in the whole series.
Slate
 

In this chilling installment in Nesbo's Insp. Harry Hole crime series, a snowman left in the front yard of Birte Becker's Oslo house is the only clue to the woman's disappearance.... Nesbo breathes new life into the serial killer subgenre, giving it a Norwegian twist and never losing his laconic hero in the process.
Publishers Weekly


Nesbo is being hailed as the next Stieg Larsson or Henning Mankell.... Apt comparisons, but they don't go far enough. This is simply the best detective novel this reviewer has read in years. —David Clendinning, West Virginia State Univ. Lib., Institute
Library Journal


[A] superb thriller.... Oslo detective Harry Hole returns, world-weary as ever, to puzzle out some very strange, and very discomfiting, events. [T]he story...unfolds at just the right pace. [A]smart, suspenseful cat-and-mouse game...and that's high praise indeed.
Kirkus Reviews