Deeply traumatized by the Snowman investigation, Inspector Harry Hole has lost himself in the squalor of Hong Kong’s opium dens. But when a series of women are murdered --- after all spending the night at the same isolated mountain hostel --- he agrees to return to Oslo to investigate the brutal case.

It is Oslo in November, and the first snow of the season has fallen. A boy named Jonas wakes in the night to find his mother gone. Antihero police investigator Harry Hole suspects a link between a menacing letter and the disappearance of Jonas’s mother --- and of perhaps a dozen other women, all of whom went missing on the day of a first snowfall.