Director Martin Scorsese is trying something different this holiday season, helming the fantastical family film Hugo, which releases on Wednesday. While the early word is positive, don't sign Marty up to helm the next hot YA property just yet. According to THR, he's signed on for a new project that will return him to his crime-film roots. Scorsese will be directing the American feature film adaptation of The Snowman, by Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo, for Working Title Films.

World War Z scripter Matthew Michael Carnahan is penning the adaptation, based on the seventh book in Nesbo's series about loose-cannon, alcoholic detective Harry Hole. The Snowman's story finds Hole on the trail of Norway's first serial killer, a vicious murderer who leaves trademark snowmen at the homes of his victims to "sign his work." Because the killer times his murders to the first snowfall of the year, no one had connected a pattern to the previous disappearances.

This won't be the first time one of Nesbo's books has made it into movie form. Headhunters, based on his novel, was released earlier this year and has become one of the most successful Norwegian films of all time, earning $12 million from the Scandinavian box office. If The Snowman proves to be a success for Scorsese and Working Title, there's plenty more material for a potential Harry Hole film series; so far Jo Nesbo has written nine books about the detective, running from 1997's The Bat Man (no relation) up through this year's The Ghost.