Yours Until Death (Eurocrime)

The single-mother families of the isolated high-rise community under the shadow of the Lyderhorn, Bergen's great mountain - steep, dark and oppressive - were being robbed, terrorized and molested by a teenage gang led by the psychopath, Joker, who looked like a priest, but with the eyes of a tiger and the teeth of a decaying corpse. It was at their "torture chamber", a hut in the pinewoods nearby, that Varg Veum, Private Investigator, first encountered 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 a preliminary brush with such youthful violence was as nothing compared to what awaited Veum when he got to know Roar's 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 proved a dead end. But not so dead as the man who lay 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." "Staalsen's mastery of pacing enables him to develop his characters in a leisurely way without sacrificing tension and suspense."-Publishers Weekly