“Jörg Fauser was a fascinating train wreck: a fiercely intelligent literary critic who also wrote the occasional nudie-magazine filler; a junkie who got clean in his thirties only to become an alcoholic; a tragic figure who died mysteriously at 43 in a 1987 Autobahn accident. Oh, and along the way he managed to crank out one of the most indelible crime novels in German history. First published in 1981, The Snowman is a classic loser's tale in which Blum, a low-rent black market fence, unexpectedly finds himself with $600,000 worth of high grade cocaine and no idea how to sell it. Fauser chronicles his increasingly desperate attempts with a gimlet eye and a black, acerbic (so, German) wit, creating an unflinchingly brilliant tale of a perspective--the outsider among outsiders--he knew all too well.” Ruminator