So it has to be murder – and he has something of a taste and a talent for “the magical moment when I, and I alone, had power over life and death” – it’s “the virus I had in my blood”, he says.

So, well aware that Pine and Hoffmann were after the girl because she’d been stupid enough to take on her boyfriend’s debts, I went out looking until I found the Frenchman in a squat up in Fagerborg. An] excursion to a slightly different corner of the criminal underworld, where death and love become tangled together in the cold, dark streets.The character is always slipping in clunky asides, protesting too much as he says things like “I don’t know much about evolution and stuff like that, but didn’t Darwin say there were only six universal facial expressions for human emotions? Then I took Maria to a flat I knew was empty, then went to tell Hoffmann that I was no use as a pimp either. He has an “innate talent for subordination” but running through his veins is a “virus” born of the power over life and death.

They topped the charts in Norway, but Nesbo continued working as a financial analyst, crunching numbers during the day and gigging at night. It’s all ever so noiry and pulpy: Nesbø’s gorgeously rendered images of snow, and of the titular blood on snow – “the snow sucked the blood up as it fell, drawing it in under the surface, hiding it, as if it had some sort of use for it” – are crying out to be filmed.In Blood On Snow, Jo Nesbo’s brilliant storytelling and quality writing shine through once again to create an incredibly well-crafted, gripping tale packed with suspense. Warner Bros, incidentally, is planning to adapt the novel as a vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio to produce and star in, according to Variety.

I don’t actually know a lot about snow – or much else, for that matter – but I’ve read that snow crystals formed when it’s really cold are completely different from wet snow, heavy flakes, or the crunchy stuff. Either way, the snow under him made me think of a king’s robe, all purple and lined with ermine, like the drawings in the book of Norwegian folk tales my mother used to read to me. We celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stories, traditions and living cultures; and we pay our respects to Elders past and present. But it still felt as if there was a right moment, one particular second squeezed in between all the other seconds.

The Harry Hole novels are multi-layered, violent, and often feature women in peril, as typified by The Snowman. And, the reader increasingly suspects, this not entirely reliable narrator is fixing the narrative of his own life. The Evening Post had said that if the cold carried on like this until New Year, 1977 would be the coldest year since the war, and that we’d remember it as the start of the new ice age scientists had been predicting for a while.

And there the dry, windswept snow was settling around the shoes of the man I had just shot in the chest and neck. And before you know it, you’re in the middle of one of the wildest scenes in recent crime fiction … where there’s hardly any place to duck, just as in this entertaining novel, when the bullets fly.It was also announced in October 2013 that Warner Brothers had bought the rights to Blood on Snow and planned to make a screen adaptation, to be produced by and possibly starring Leonardo DiCaprio. He takes it on, reluctantly but professionally, and as he watches Corina from the hotel room he’s rented across from the Hoffmans’ central Oslo apartment, he becomes “bewitched”. Doctor Proctor's first major inventions are a powder that makes the user fart (and the farts don't smell) and the "Fartonaut Powder," which makes the user fart so powerfully that they blast into space. All snow algae producing red or orange snow are actually green alga that owe their red color to a bright red carotenoid pigment, which protects the chloroplast from intense visible and also ultraviolet radiation, as well as absorbing heat, which provides the alga with liquid water as the snow melts around it.