Internationally acclaimed, best-selling Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo appears on the Knopf list for the first time with a bone-chilling new thriller about a serial killer who takes Harry Hole--Nesbo's irascible police investigator-- to the brink of insanity.

The first snow of the season has fallen in Oslo. A boy named Jonas wakes in the night to find his mother gone. Outside he sees the snowman, bathed in cold moonlight, that inexplicably appeared in the yard that day--his mother's pink scarf around its neck. Hole suspects there is a link to a menacing letter he recently received. And as the number of missing women grows, it becomes more and more clear that he is a pawn in a terrifying game whose rules are devised--and constantly revised--by the killer.

Fiercely suspenseful, its characters brilliantly realized, its atmosphere steeped in evil, "The Snowman" is the work of one of the best crime writers of our time.