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The Snowman is a blizzard of cliches, a swirling maelstrom of silly nightmares and a great mound of nonsense. It's a serial-killer murder-mystery where the narration shifts so much and the details are handed out so inconsistently you feel like the author is leading you around by the nose. The red-herrings are numerous and obvious (multiple times, the police become convinced they've caught the killer; the back-slapping is so strenuous I'm surprised there aren't more injuries) and the depictions of murder so over-the-top I found myself laughing out loud (imagine every possible combination of snowman imagery + corpse you can think of.) But worst of all was how often my BS detector went off when any character (ANY character) opened their mouth to mention something about how they feel the world works.

On this final point I feel compelled to provide examples. At one point, a supposedly intelligent (though arrogant) pundit claims George W. Bush's re-election as president was a good thing for international security because his advisers are brilliant; ignoring the fact that those clever minds thought the invasion of Iraq was a good idea, that surely Sadam Hussein was hiding WMDs (even though his hiding his own weakness was just as plausible) and that they came into office thinking the great security issue they'd face would be ballistic missile defense (as opposed to terrorism.)

At another point, a supposedly smart detective comments that highly-intelligent people are obsessed with IQ, for after all, they have a whole society built on it (Mensa.) This ignores the fact that Mensa is a fairly small organization; about 100,000 members despite being international and with a potential membership of tens of millions (2% of the whole world.) You would have more reason to look at the historic membership of the Ku Klux Klan (over a million at one point in just the United States) and claim that 'white people sure are obsessed with being white.'

At still another point, a supposedly clever TV psychologist (or something like that) claims that humans revere heroic losses more than victories and uses Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo as his prime example. And to a degree that's true, Waterloo is a revered and highly remarked battle... IN ENGLAND! YOU KNOW, THE COUNTRY THAT WON THE BATTLE!

By around page 100 I started skimming; the pages flew past like snowflakes but it still felt like shoveling 2-foot-high slush. Hopefully the catharsis of review will prove enough to clear my mental driveway.