The book opens in first person and stays there for the first several chapters. Then, without much warning, it doesn’t. Kurt gets a chapter told from outside him, in third person. So does Petersen, the detective assigned to the case, and his chapters keep recurring for the rest of the book, tracking an investigation my protagonist has no idea is happening.
This wasn’t a structural decision I made lightly, and it wasn’t one I made early. The first draft stayed entirely in my protagonist’s head, start to finish, and it was airless in a way I didn’t fully understand until I tried opening it up. First person is extraordinarily good at intimacy. It’s much worse at suspense that depends on the reader knowing more than the narrator does, and by the middle of the book, that’s exactly the kind of tension I needed. Petersen investigating in the background, slowly, methodically, closing distance my protagonist can’t see – none of that works if the reader is trapped entirely inside one perspective with no visibility into what’s closing in.
Giving Kurt his own chapter was a different kind of decision, and a harder one to justify to myself at the time. My protagonist never gets to know Kurt as anything other than the man who took his family. The reader does. We see Kurt’s ordinary, irritable morning, the small compounding decisions that turn a bad day into an unforgivable one. I went back and forth for a long time about whether that chapter belonged in the book at all, because it risks generating sympathy for a character the story otherwise treats as a catalyst rather than a person. In the end, I kept it because I think withholding it would have been a kind of dishonesty – it would have let the reader hold a simpler, more comfortable version of Kurt than the one my protagonist himself is forced to confront in that courtroom, sitting a few feet away from a man who, up close, doesn’t look like a monster at all.
The effect of moving between these perspectives, I hope, is that no single character gets to control how the reader understands the story. My protagonist’s account of his own plan is precise and controlled, sometimes almost persuasive in how reasonable he makes it sound. Petersen’s chapters undercut that control from the outside, showing gaps and mistakes my protagonist doesn’t know he’s leaving behind. Kurt’s single chapter complicates the reader’s appetite for punishment before the punishment even arrives. None of the three men gets to be the story’s moral center, because I didn’t want the book to have one. I wanted the reader building their own read of events out of pieces that don’t fully agree with each other, the way most real judgments about complicated situations actually get formed.
There’s also a simpler, more technical reason for the shift, which is pacing. A book this length, told entirely from inside one man’s increasingly narrow, obsessive point of view, risks becoming exhausting well before the ending. Stepping outside his head periodically – into Petersen’s overtime shifts, his frustration, his slowly forming theory of the case – gave the book room to breathe that staying locked in first person the whole way through simply wouldn’t have allowed. It also let me control what the reader knows and when, which matters enormously in a story where dramatic irony does a lot of the tension’s heavy lifting.
I understand why the shift can feel disorienting on a first read, particularly for readers who’ve settled into my protagonist’s voice by that point and don’t expect to leave it. That disorientation was, honestly, part of the intent. He’s losing control of his own carefully managed situation, piece by piece, without knowing it yet, and I wanted the reader to feel a version of that loss of control too – watching someone else’s investigation close in from outside, while the person it’s closing in on remains convinced he’s still the only one steering the story.
Looking back at the earliest draft now, I can see how much that single structural choice changed the book’s temperature. The version told entirely from inside my protagonist’s head was intense, but it was intense in only one register the whole way through. Letting Petersen and Kurt each hold a piece of the story gave the tension somewhere to breathe between his chapters, and gave the ending, when it finally arrives, a weight it wouldn’t have earned on its own.
There’s a craft lesson in this I didn’t fully appreciate until I was well past the halfway point of writing the book: a reader trusts a narrator more, not less, once that narrator’s account has been quietly checked against someone else’s version of events. My protagonist never lies to the reader, exactly, but he selects. He tells us what serves the story he’s telling himself. Petersen’s chapters don’t contradict him so much as fill in what he leaves out, and that gap between what one man chooses to say and what actually happened is where a lot of the book’s tension actually lives, more than in any single confrontation.
