All were married with children, and all were having affairs. Soon enough, Harry finds himself working with a young female officer, Katrine Bratt (Rebecca Ferguson), on the case of several women who’ve gone missing. “Let’s stick with the uncle story.”īut Hole’s wish is granted almost instantaneously, in the form of a mysterious note addressed to him, written in a childish scrawl, and signed with a stick-figure snowman. “I apologize for Oslo’s low murder rate,” the superior answers drily. When he arrives at work, it turns out that he has been alcoholically absent for a week, and he offers his superior a quarter-hearted excuse about a dead uncle before getting to the real point: He is asleep on a bench in a snowy park, an empty bottle of vodka dangling from his fingers. Following a creepy prologue in which a young boy discovers his mother sleeping with an illicit boyfriend, we meet our protagonist, the legendary Oslo homicide detective Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender). So who better to tackle Nesbø’s novel than Alfredson? A Teutonic two-fer, so to speak.Īlas, the movie is largely a mess, though the blame would seem to belong no more to Alfredson than to an abbreviated shooting schedule and a screenplay (by Hossein Amini, Peter Straughan, and Søren Sveistrup) that takes radical liberties in condensing the novel. His Let the Right One In was a fine if overpraised film, and his Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, while admirable in many ways, failed specifically by being too cold, austere, and stylized-in a word, too Scandinavian. The film adaptation is directed by Tomas Alfredson-Martin Scorsese was attached for a time, but dropped out to produce instead-and the Swedish director would seem to be an excellent choice. But it managed to cunningly blend the psychosexual depravity of peak Thomas Harris with the spirit-numbing winter vibe of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

A serial-killer novel set in Norway, it was by no means a great book. I read The Snowman many years back and its memory continues to put a chill in my bones.

The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record Peter Brannen

The snowman a harry hole novel jo nesbø