Murder at Barcode – crime novel (e-book)

On a Saturday night in September, a single window glows red on the 14th floor of Barcode, Oslo's glittering financial district. By Monday morning, Jonas Hegge, the golden boy of an investment firm, lies dead at the foot of a glass staircase. Kristian Vang has everything: a partnership, a million-kroner bonus, a villa by the fjord, a wife who trusts him and two small children. He also has a secret phone, a hole in his memory and a key card that proves he was there that night. Detective Inspector Selma Haddad has met plenty of liars, but never one as good as a man with everything to lose. Murder at Barcode is a fast, funny and dark crime novel about money, cocaine and parties with sky-high ceilings, and about the price of living two lives at once. The first book in the Barcode Series.

• A gripping Oslo crime novel set in Barcode, Sørenga and on the Opera roof
• Money, parties and secrets under sky-high ceilings
• Detective Inspector Selma Haddad's first case
• The first book in the Barcode Series, with an ending that leaves you hungry for the next
• Approx. 68 pages
• EPUB for e-readers and PDF for phone, tablet or print

Prologue: 03:51

The red light had been Jonas's idea.

It was one of the things he had come up with on a Friday three years ago, with champagne in one hand and his phone in the other: a row of LED strips under the ceiling of the lounge, controlled from an app, that could turn the double-height room on the 14th and 15th floors into anything at all. Blue for client meetings. White for the cleaners. Red for afterwards.

Now it was red, and it was afterwards, and Jonas Hegge stood alone at the glass railing on the mezzanine, looking down at the room he had loved more than anywhere else in Oslo.

It smelled sweet with spilled spirits and bitter with something else. A dress lay over one of the sofas, and someone had stacked six empty magnums into a pyramid on the bar. In the great window facing the fjord he could see his own reflection, red and black, and behind it the city. The Opera House like an ice floe. The lights on Ekeberg hill. A taxi crawling along Dronning Eufemias gate, alone, as if it were on its way home from a party it hadn't been invited to.

He picked up his phone. No new messages. The last one he had sent was still there, with two grey ticks, read:

I'm doing it on Monday. I'm done being afraid.

He had thought he would feel lighter. He didn't. He could feel his heart beating too fast, the way it always did around four in the morning, when the powder let go and everything he had pushed away came back all at once.

The lift pinged.

It was a sound he knew better than his own ringtone: two notes, low and high, like a polite butler. No one was supposed to be here. The night guard did his round at five. The others had left an hour ago, in clusters, laughing and promising each other things they wouldn't remember in the morning.

The doors slid open down in the lounge. He heard footsteps across the oak floor, calm, unhurried.

… The excerpt continues in the book.

• Prologue: 03:51
• 1. Monday
• 2. The Red Room
• 3. 2017: The Golden Years
• 4. The Interview
• 5. The Other Phone
• 6. VELVET
• 7. 2019: The Powder Party
• 8. Fjordlys
• 9. The Video
• 10. Sørenga
• 11. Ingrid
• 12. Fragments
• 13. The Opera Roof
• 14. Released
• Epilogue: The Red Room

Format: E-book as EPUB (Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, Kindle via “Send to Kindle”) and PDF.. Made with the help of AI and tested by our quality control. Not tax, accounting or legal advice. Terms and right of withdrawal