Images of dismembered women can affect crime fiction readers in a number of ways: they may shock, enrage, disgust, or titillate them. In her novel Birdman, British author Mo Hayder presents a woman whose ‘scalp had been peeled from the skull … folded over so the hair and face hung like a wet rubber mask, inside out, covering the mouth and neck, pooling on the clavicle’ (2000: 24). In The Snowman, Norwegian author Jo Nesbø describes the body of a woman, so mutilated that it ‘was only thanks to a naked breast that they had been able to determine gender’ (2010: 54). Claims have been made that crime fiction is ramping up the violence towards female victims as a sales ploy (Hill 2009), yet I argue that in Nesbø and Hayder, the representation of violence is central to their attempt to examine critically society’s contempt for women and their bodies. In this chapter I demonstrate, through close readings of Mo Hayder’s Birdman and Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman, how these two authors not only resist the powerful trope of the eroticized female corpse, but also use images of violence and dismemberment to criticize the way society reduces women to their sexual and reproductive functions and destroys them when they are surplus to requirements.