Yours Until Death

by Gunnar Staalesen

Published 15 March 1993

'The Norwegian Chandler' Jo Nesbø
'One of my very favourite Scandinavian authors' Ian Rankin
MORE THAN FIVE MILLION BOOKS SOLD WORLDWIDE
An unbearably tense thriller of revenge, murder, bereavement and the destructive force of passion

It is at their 'torture chamber', a hut in the pinewoods nearby, that Varg Veum, Private Investigator, first encounters the gang's pathetic but deadly ferocity. Eight-year-old Roar's bicycle had been stolen and not an adult in sight dared retrieve it.

But that preliminary brush with youthful violence is nothing compared to what awaited Veum when he got to know Roar's blue-eyed, shy yet sensuous mother, Wenche Andresen, and her estranged husband, Jonas.

Veum's attempts to break up Joker and his pack of young thugs by enlisting the help of the local youth club leader proves a dead end. But not so dead as the man who found lying prone with a knife in his back on the floor of Andresen's flat.

Yours Until Death is an unbearably tense novel of revenge and murder about marriage, childhood, bereavement and the destructive force of passion. First published in Norwegian in 1979, it was described by the critic Nils Nordberg as 'one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing'.

Translated from the Norwegian by Margaret Amassian