The Tide is a Norwegian crime thriller set in and around Haugesund on the west coast of Norway — a city of bridges, tidal waters and Viking history that becomes the backdrop for a series of meticulously planned executions. When fertility doctor Jan Vidar Osnes is found chained to the seabed at Killingøy, a white letter E inside a triangle spray-painted on the rock above him, lead investigator Edgar Liknes has never encountered anything like it. The method is ancient — borrowed from the tidal execution docks of seventeenth-century London — and the symbol points toward a killer with a deep knowledge of history and an unshakeable sense of divine mission. Edgar is thirty-eight, a recovering addict with a failed marriage behind him and a solitary life in a terraced flat in Haugesund. He is also one of the finest investigators the city has produced. His instinct tells him from the beginning that the religious motive is real — and that the killer will strike again. A suspect is arrested. DNA evidence appears conclusive. An innocent man spends five months in prison while the real killer watches the investigation unfold from a safe distance — reading the newspaper reports over breakfast, sitting beside his wife and children, planning the next execution with the same calm precision as the first. Kai Hauge is thirty-four years old. He is a schoolteacher, a husband, a father of two small children. He is also a man shaped by a childhood of loss and trauma — a father who drowned, a mother broken by grief, a miscarriage witnessed at the age of ten that left a wound that never healed. His Catholic faith, kept hidden from his wife and colleagues, has curdled over the years into something darker: a conviction that those who tamper with God's created order must be made to answer for their sins. The victims are connected by their involvement in assisted reproduction — a fertility doctor, a sperm donor, a psychologist. Each execution follows the same ritual. Each is preceded by meticulous surveillance, a dart gun in the darkness, and a set of words recited before the tide does its work. Meanwhile Edgar grows closer to the truth — and closer to Kai — without knowing it. Their paths cross repeatedly. They have even met before, on a tourist boat on the Thames in London ten years earlier, where a young student teacher said something that lodged in Edgar's memory without him understanding why. The Tide moves between two perspectives with mounting tension — the investigator who must find the killer before the next execution, and the killer who is watching the investigator close in. It is a novel about faith and fanaticism, about the secrets families keep, about the damage done to children that surfaces decades later in ways no one could have predicted. The ending reaches back to the very first page — to a stormy night in a Haugesund maternity ward in 1993, and a choice made by a mother that neither she nor anyone else could have known would set everything in motion. Rooted in the landscape, history and tidal rhythms of western Norway, The Tide is a crime novel with the brooding atmosphere of Scandinavian noir and the psychological depth of the best British crime fiction.