Martin Scorsese has officially added yet another movie to his list of potential projects.  THR reports that Scorsese has been confirmed to direct an adaptation of Jo Nesbo's best-selling crime thriller The Snowman.  Last month we reported that Scorsese was seriously considering Snowman as his next film, and would once again push aside his Jesuit priest-drama Silence as well as The Irishman, The Wolf of Wall Street, a remake of The Gambler, and a Frank Sinatra biopic.  Nesbo reportedly had to confirm Scorsese for the gig (I'm not sure why this would involve thinking twice), but didn't insist that the movie retain the book's setting of Oslo, Norway.

Snowman is in the seventh book in the "Harry Hole" detective series.  Per THR, Hole is "an anti-authoritarian, anti-sobriety cop, who investigates particularly gruesome killings. In The Snowman, a son finds his mother’s pink scarf wrapped around the neck of an ominous looking snowman. Hole realizes she is the latest victim of a serial killer."  Also ominous: a magical top hat found near the scene.* Hit the jump for a full synopsis.  Scorsese's new film, Hugo, opens in 3D on Wednesday.

the-snowman-book-cover

Here's the synopsis for Jo Nesbo's The Snowman:

Internationally acclaimed crime writer Jo Nesbø’s antihero police investigator, Harry Hole, is back in a bone-chilling thriller that will take Hole to the brink of insanity.

Oslo in November. The first snow of the season has fallen. A boy named Jonas wakes in the night to find his mother gone. Out his window, in the cold moonlight, he sees the snowman that inexplicably appeared in the yard earlier in the day. Around its neck is his mother’s pink scarf.

Hole suspects a link between a menacing letter he’s received 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. As his investigation deepens, something else emerges: he is becoming a pawn in an increasingly terrifying game whose rules are devised—and constantly revised—by the killer.

Fiercely suspenseful, its characters brilliantly realized, its atmosphere permeated with evil, The Snowman is the electrifying work of one of the best crime writers of our time. [Amazon]

*I may have added that last bit.  It's a mystery.  Meta-mystery.