The Snowman by Jo Nesbo

This is the first Jo Nesbo book I've read, after hearing many rave reviews about his work. It's also the first book I read in kindle format, so a new experience all round. I didn't know what I was expecting from the title, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Nesbo has been compared to Stieg Larsson, perhaps largely due to the genre and home country they share, but I actually preferred this book to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy.
The story starts with a mother leaving her young child in a car in freezing weather while she enjoys a final tryst with her lover. There's a snowman in the yard and, as the title suggests, this comes to have more significance as the tale unfolds.
Fastforward to the present day, and the first snowfall of the season and a young woman, married with children, has gone missing without a trace, apart from a series of wet footprints on the stairs. There's a snowman on the front lawn...
Soon, after several similar cases crop up, Detective Harry Hole realises there's a disturbingly intelligent, sick serial killer on the loose - The Snowman - and it's his job to put a stop to his hideous hobby. Although initially a tale of two missing women, the story develops rapidly as you turn each page and it becomes so much more than you're originally lead to believe.
From then on, you're flung back and forth between the past and present, and introduced to a plethora of suspicious characters along the way as this genius, complex story takes shape. It's not hard to guess who the murderer is, indeed I don't think it's supposed to be. But the brilliance lies in the way the author manages to keep you on the edge of your seat despite this fact, with so many twists and turns your head is spinning by the end of it.
I don't want to go into detail for fear of giving too much away but if you enjoy a good crime thriller, put this one at the top of your 'to buy' list.

House Rules by Jodi Picoult

It's been a while since I last blogged - mainly due to a hectic run up to Christmas, a bout of Christmas illness, and a marvellous gift that has taken up all my attention; the kindle! Instead of blogging about every book I've been reading, I've been spending hours geekily categorising, downloading and organising my fantastic new toy, so much so that the battery is about to die a week after I received it instead of the usual month!
Anyway, more about that later. Before I became obsessed with the kindle, I was reading House Rules by Jodi Picoult. I'm a huge Picoult fan with My Sister's Keeper sitting firmly in my top ten, simply for one of the most amazing plot twists and jaw-dropping moments ever. However, this tale of an autistic boy, Jacob, accused of murder, just didn't do it for me. Although Picoult paints a very vivid picture of living with an autistic child - one that encompasses everything from the sadness, frustration, moments of fleeting joy and, lastly, hope, that comes with it, I didn't get caught up in the story.
Perhaps there were too many character perspectives in this one, but I found myself putting it down for days on end - returning to it seemed a chore, and I'm not usually like that with books. The tale is a clever one - after all, Jacob is so literal that his mother, Emma, can't put her hand on her heart and say that he's innocent - and there's a nice little twist at the end, although the reader is given enough information at the beginning to work this out much earlier. For me, it's not one of her best.