A review by ashleymg99
The Snowman by Jo Nesbø

dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

I read this as part of StoryGraph‘s Read the World challenge for Norway.

The first half of the book was slow and hard for me to get into - but the further into it I got, the more invested I became, and the more it started to pick up. Overall, I thought it was a good mystery, and one that the reader can solve on their own, which is always nice.

Spoilers in my critique - don’t read if you want to try and solve the mystery! 

my biggest complaint is that I felt like the murder was “solved” too many times - every suspect they investigated was definitely the culprit, but when there’s still 200 pages left in the book, you know that they have the wrong person! It just made you start to think that any person who was a suspect couldn’t be the killer, and it took some of the suspense out of the scenes where they interrogated or accused people. Of course, Nesbø explains this away in the book and even uses it as a plot device (with the whole “Katrine breaking down, which only lead to ANOTHER “we caught the killer!”), but as the reader, I was getting tired of them saying they “caught the killer” so prematurely every time. If the police weren’t so i competent, they probably could have solved the murder in half the time! Remember kids, #ACAB, not just in America)
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