 |
| The Snowman |
After spending a lot of November reading fantasies, I decided to change things up by reading a mystery recommended to me by my mum. I’m really glad I did. If it wasn’t a Sunday, I would have gone straight to the library after finishing it to pick up the rest of the books in the series. Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman is not the first novel to feature Inspector Harry Hole, but it wasn’t hard for me to get up to speed.
The Snowman is a terrifically tense Scandinavian mystery set in Oslo. (Because I have family from Norway, it was fun to spot familiar names.) At first, it seems like just another serial killer novel. Inspector Harry Hole, one of the few zen detectives* I’ve come across, is tasked with investigating what appear to be puzzling missing persons cases. But someone is killing these women and has been for a long time (although only a few bodies are found). There is, of course, pressure from the top brass and from the press to solve the case once it becomes clear that there is a serial murderer running around. Hole also has to deal with his own demon; he is a recovering alcoholic who does not attend meetings. He’s relying on sheer willpower to resist temptation.
Nesbø has a terrific way of revealing clues and details in such a way that you start to see what’s going on well before the rest of the police figure it out–but you won’t figure out who did it until the very end. Nesbø gives us no less then two spectacular twists that lead us all down the wrong path until he decides to reveal the real killer. The whole plot grows up organically around you and feels utterly real. Not only do we get a twisty, turning mystery plot, but Nesbø has a knack for pacing that kept me reading for hours. I could not put it down for the entire last third. I had to see what happened next!
Harry Hole is another part of what makes this book work. He seems like such a real person, with realistic flaws and hopes. He’s just as morose as you’d expect from a Scandinavian detective, but he doesn’t make you depressed as you ride around on his shoulder as the plot unfolds. He’s got a very interesting mind. As I said before, he’s a zen detectives. So it seems like he does very little to advance the investigation. In fact, he explicitly refuses to use the normal methods that his superior expects. According to Hole, too many details get in the way of the case. He knows that the killer is too smart to be caught by little mistakes. Every clue they do find is likely to be planted. Hole listens to his instincts, lets details percolate at the back of his head until they make sense. It makes for a very interesting and unusual reading experience.
I am so going to the library tomorrow.
* Zen detectives are investigators that don’t rely so much on forensics to solve the case. Instead, they tend let events develop around them and intuit their way towards the criminal. They are almost the complete opposite of ratiocinators like Sherlock Holmes.