As I strolled down the aisles of a chaotic Sainsburys on a busy Saturday morning, something immediately caught my eye! 

Yes, of course I had wandered down to the book section. As anyone that truly knows me, will know I can be quite a bookworm, and I especially love crime, mystery, and horror genres.

It wasn’t just the big, bright red sticker marked £3.99 that caught my eye – BARGAIN! It was both the title of the book, and the four powerful words above the title, that were almost screaming at me: THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER!

Of course, the book was:

The Snowman

– Jo Nesbo

For those of you who are currently thinking – urmm excuse me? Who? What’s that? The book can be more recognised from the 2017 crime/mystery film.

In a nutshell, it’s about a detective called Harry Hole, who seeks to solve the mystery of the disappearance of a woman. The most intriguing yet disturbing part of the disappearance is the fact that her scarf is wrapped around a snowman’s neck, which has been built right outside her home.

To learn more about the plot click here:

‘The plot thins…’

The plot far from thickens in this story as it does quite the opposite, by thinning. Even when I was 400 pages plus into the book I was more ‘Lost’ than the Channel 4 series, with the confusion of characters, and how they interlinked was mind boggling!

From what started as a very interesting book, with the mystery increasing, especially when you have the first taste of crime when a snowman’s head is replaced with a human head! (SPOILER ALERT!)

This interest unfortunately soon fizzled out, as the action was soon replaced with lots of conversation, and not to mention very irrelevant references to the main character masturbating and having sexual thoughts about another character.

We as the audience are interested in the murders, not Harry Hole’s sexual fantasies – it’s not ’50 shades of snowman’ now is it?

Similarly to a snowman melting in the sun, my mind was melting away and my interest in the story from here onward had somewhat evaporated. It’s a true shame as the book had such potential to be far greater than what it lived up to. On this occasion it was far too much of a slow burner, and the action was about as realistic as a snowman.

Unfortunately, the only snowman I will be reading again will be ‘The Snowman’ by Raymond Briggs!