Yngve put the tea down. He was on call again, and he always feared the worst when one of his co-workers rang. He answered and heard a quiet sob at the other end. For a brief moment he was afraid that something terrible had struck the lovely town of Fredheim once again.

‘He’s here,’ Therese said with a sniff. ‘He came last night. It’s a boy!’

Yngve exhaled with a smile. At first he couldn’t get a word out, because he was thinking about God again.

‘How wonderful,’ Yngve said as the tears emerged from his eyes. ‘I’m so happy for you, Therese. My warmest congratulations.’

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

God, I don’t even know where to begin.

But I guess Even Tollefsen’s story, for me, began back in 2015 when lightning struck me – in the form of my wife. Yes, she can do that from time to time, and no, it’s not a euphemism. We were in the kitchen, preparing dinner for the pack of wolves in the house, when I decided to run an idea by her. I probably had a glass of wine in my hand when I said, ‘So basically I have a story in mind about a teenage boy whose girlfriend is found dead inside his school early one morning. She broke up with him two days before, and she’s been murdered before he’s had a chance to ask her why. Everyone in the small town thinks he did it, because he was angry and potentially jealous. I don’t know yet if this is a young-adult book, where we just follow the main character’s trials and tribulations, or if it’s a normal crime novel for a normal crimefiction reading audience, where you focus on the investigative part and hunt down the killer.’

My wife thought about this for about four and a half seconds, then looked at me with a slight shrug and said: ‘Why can’t you do both?’

First, I didn’t know what to say. Write two novels about the same story? Who the hell does that? The quick answer was, no one. No one had published two novels at the same time, one for the YA audience and one for adults. And thus my mind started to contemplate and process the idea of doing exactly that. And the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of writing two books that ended the same way, but where the roads travelled would differ considerably. Uncharted territory, right? I was picturing Oprah Winfrey’s book club going crazy about giving one book to the parents and the other to the kids in the household, and then they could all talk about it afterwards.