In this series, we invite our Crime Cymru authors to showcase an excerpt from one of their books. This week, Katherine Stansfield offers a fascinating insight into beginnings and ends and their roles and the powerful relationship that exists between them.

The first page: an end in the beginning

The first and last pages of a novel are as distant from one another as it’s possible to be in a story – literally, in terms of the pages that separate them, and figuratively, given all that happens by the end of the story and how the characters have changed in the meantime. But the first and last pages have several things in common, not least the fact they are often the most re-written parts of a novel. They can also echo one another in all sorts of fascinating ways, with a beginning pointing forwards to things that will become important…