Nabokov described this novella, written in Paris in 1939 but only published twenty years later, as 'the first little throb of Lolita'. The plot is similar: a middle-aged man wedding an unattractive widow in order to indulge his paedophilic obsession with her daughter.
Criminal investigating officer Hanne Wilhelmsen considers the possibility of a serial killer as she tracks down a series of numbers written in blood appearing on walls all over Oslo.