Admit it: You are LARS KEPLER

Once upon a time, there was this struggling, married couple in Stockholm, Sweden. They had three lovely daughters, they were both writers – he wrote modern literary fiction, and she wrote historical novels.

"Imagine", one of them said one day.

"What?"

"Imagine us writing something together."

"Why haven't we thought of that before?"

"I know!"

They loved each other, they were enthusiastic, but that doesn't mean you can write together ...

We can laugh at it now, but we had a whole lot of arguments and failed attempts before we found the key to the collaboration.

We started to work on a children’s book but that it did not work, it was quite impossible for us to agree on anything.

We just couldn’t get our styles into harmony.

Actually, we argued about every possible detail.

We tried to write a play for the theatre and failed again.

But we didn’t want to give up – we got a new idea.

A third author.

We invented a writer who was neither Alexander nor Alexandra, but a person in his own right. Lars Kepler.

The name Lars is a homage to Stieg Larsson. He opened a lot of doors to the world for Scandinavian writers but died tragically before he could enter the scene himself. The name Kepler is a tribute to the amazing scientist, Johannes Kepler.

We gave Lars Kepler a life story of his own: he had once been a teacher, who had become totally lonely after a personal tragedy. Now he works nights at a hostel for homeless people and writes crime novels in the daytime.

As soon as we began to write as Lars Kepler an enormous creativity took over, a mutual flow.

It was amazing ... it suddenly felt like we had this fantastic jazz session together, jamming.

In the beginning, we were worried that the magic we had found would disappear. We did everything in our power to make Lars Kepler stay with us. We even gave him special habits, like drinking tea and eating lemon biscuits. A part of our plan to protect the creativity was to keep it a secret, the writers behind Lars Kepler, we wanted to stay out of the limelight and just write together ...

But after the immediate success with our first book, THE HYPNOTIST, media went crazy in Sweden and started a manhunt.

A famous criminologist structured a profile of Lars Kepler in a live broadcast on television, and the biggest tabloid newspaper in Sweden set up a 24-hour hotline for tip-offs from the general public.

We went into hiding with our three daughters in a little house on the Swedish west coast.

It was August 2009, and the nights had become dark again. Late one evening just before bedtime we saw a flickering light at the far end of the garden. The light came from a torch. Someone approached the house across the lawn. Until the very last moment we kept hoping that this would be no more than some neighbor looking for a runaway dog, but when we heard the knocking on the door we realized we were exposed.

In the darkness outside the door stood two journalists from the big tabloid newspaper. One of them held the torch, the other a camera. “Admit it, you’re Lars Kepler,” said the man with the torch.

The next day our publisher arranged a press conference where we told the truth. It turned into the biggest news story of that summer.

First, when it happened, when we were exposed, we were afraid of losing the spark, but we didn't; the magic was still there ...

Now Lars Kepler is published in 60 countries and became the bestselling author of the decade in Sweden.

THE MIRROR MAN is one of our darkest books so far. It starts with a girl vanishing on her way home from school. Five years later she is found murdered on a playground in the night in the middle of Stockholm. Detective Joona Linna studies the surveillance cameras and manages to trace a witness, a man with a dog stares in the direction of the homicide. It turns out that the witness is mentally ill, he doesn't speak and has no memories of what he saw that night. Joona Linna then turns to his old friend, the hypnotist, and asks him to help the witness release the memories of that night.

We always try to write exactly the kind of book that we would love to read ourselves. THE MIRROR MAN is a fast-paced thriller and a very dark, psychological labyrinth at the same time. When we wrote THE MIRROR MAN it sometimes became so intense that we had to leave our computers and just stand on the balcony and breathe for a while.