When two young Norwegian schoolboys discover a body in a thawing river, a haunting story of long-held family secrets and, ultimately, a type of justice, begins.

It was the boy, Jakob, who saw it first, as he skipped across the bridge on his way to school. A flutter of red cloth at the edge of the breaking ice, as the water in the slowly thawing river began to flow. He remembered that his classmate Mikkel had lost his scarf in a gust of wind, crossing the bridge some months earlier. He would show him on the way home. Perhaps they might even be able to recover it from its watery resting place.

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As Nils and Felix ambled side-by-side down the steady cobbled decline, the chilled afternoon breeze sat in their lungs like mint on their tongues. Their wooden-heeled shoes clapped against the stones underfoot like distant gunshots in the morning fog. Felix shuddered in the cold and let his breath ring out into the stony air where it sat like blood in water. He raised his hands, palms down, to feel the air, then muttered, “Like a slow trap of steel”.