Stockholm is the novel’s central setting: both the working territory of Detective Superintendent Jeanette Kihlberg and a city whose ordinary domestic and public spaces become entangled with the investigation. From Gamla Enskede and the crime scene at Thorildsplan Metro Station to Kronoberg Police Headquarters, Södermalm, and the city’s parks, streets, and cemetery, its locations give the story a concrete geography. The city also changes in mood and season, offering contrasts between routine and crisis, visibility and disappearance, and the promise of an answer and the difficulty of finding one.

The city as investigative ground

Stockholm’s police geography emerges early through Jeanette’s journey from Gamla Enskede to the crime scene at Thorildsplan Metro Station. On the morning she leaves home, she does not yet know that the case will begin a chain of events that changes her life. The city’s roads are already part of the scene: her fifteen-year-old car pulls to the right, and she crawls along before turning toward the metro station and the police cordon. The movement from home to an urban crime scene makes the investigation feel close to everyday life rather than sealed off in a distant professional world.

Kronoberg Police Headquarters supplies the other recurring pole of this geography. It is where Jeanette delegates the investigation’s first steps, later faces the difficulties of obtaining a court order, and discusses newly emerging facts with colleagues. As the case grows, the headquarters becomes a place for assembling and interpreting information: Jeanette groups the names that have surfaced and draws connections between them on a large sheet of paper. The city’s dispersed locations and people are brought together there, though a diagram of relationships is not the same as a complete understanding of what has happened.

Stockholm’s scale is presented as both a practical constraint and a source of unlikely connections. When Jeanette discovers that Samuel Bai had received help from Sofia Zetterlund, she recognizes that the same specialist’s name has surfaced in another part of the investigation. The city seems small enough for professional and personal histories to cross, yet the limited number of police officers specializing in crimes against children and psychologists working with traumatized children makes those crossings plausible. Stockholm is thus not merely a large setting through which characters pass; it is a network in which scarce expertise, earlier contacts, and current cases converge.

Homes and everyday routines

The city’s domestic life is visible in the Kihlberg home in Gamla Enskede. Before Jeanette leaves for work, she sees Åke in the window, though he does not see her. His plans for the morning involve washing the family’s accumulation of football clothes and, while the machine runs, returning to the attic studio where he works on unfinished oil paintings. Jeanette’s recollection of his stalled artistic ambitions adds a private, familiar rhythm to the same city that will soon become the terrain of police work. The household is not detached from the investigation’s world: it is the everyday life Jeanette leaves behind when she drives toward the cordon.

Södermalm presents another domestic threshold. At a kitchen window, a view of a park, trees, and parked cars prompts the question of whether the place can be called home. The brief moment gives the city a personal meaning without resolving it: a familiar street view does not necessarily settle a character’s sense of belonging. That uncertainty is echoed by the investigation’s concern with people whose histories and identities are difficult to establish. In Stockholm, an ordinary address can be a home, a point of departure, or simply a place from which someone is absent.

The city also accommodates forms of departure. At Stockholm Central Station on New Year’s morning, a woman studies the departure board, buys a return ticket to Gothenburg for a train leaving at eight, purchases cigarettes, and waits in a café. The sequence makes travel concrete through the station’s ordinary choices and procedures, while her hesitation about the destination leaves the decision unsettled. Stockholm is a point of transit as well as a place where the investigation’s lives intersect: its stations offer routes outward, but the act of leaving does not by itself explain what a person is leaving behind.

Parks, streets, and historical layers

Stockholm’s parks recur as places where the city’s public landscape meets private strain. At Björns Trädgård, a woman sits beneath the trees while an internal buzzing overwhelms her and she doubts she can make it home. In a different scene, the city centre’s Kungsgatan is introduced through its accumulated history. Excavations into the Brunkeberg Ridge preceded the street’s inauguration in November 1911; work there exposed remains of a Viking settlement near what is now Hötorget. The street’s earlier names, Helsingegathun and later Lutternsgatan, belong to a past when the area was described as rough and lined with small shacks and old wooden houses. This historical account gives the contemporary city depth: its streets have been renamed, rebuilt, and laid over earlier lives.

The weather and seasons make that urban setting change without making it unfamiliar. From Glasbruksgatan on Katarinaberget, in the neighborhood below Mosebacke, rain and mist obscure views toward Skeppsholmen and Kastellholmen. Elsewhere, autumn leaves and damp air give Stockholm a colder cast. At the Forest Cemetery, by contrast, the interment of Bengt and Birgitta Bergman’s remains takes place beneath a bright sky, despite the expectation that a summer storm would better suit the occasion. The cemetery’s dozen or so cars do not belong to ceremony participants; the woman attending expects to be the only person present. The contrast between public setting and solitary attendance makes the city’s open spaces hold private absence without turning that absence into a spectacle.

A city of intersections and reversals

Later in the story, a burning blue car on Tantoberget becomes a clue that helps Jeanette and Jens Hurtig see more of the case. The hill’s history is also described in terms of discarded matter: before the ground became a park, it had served as a dump and a cemetery for human refuse, and it has again become a site associated with scrap and waste. The scene makes the landscape’s earlier uses part of its present significance. A place that appears to have been made orderly and public retains a history of what the city has cast aside; the burning car turns that tension into an investigative turning point.

The city’s geography continues to widen toward Djurgården and Hundudden, where a question about the identity of a dead man on a boat leads Jeanette to pursue another possibility: that Viggo Dürer may still be alive. Stockholm’s waterside locations and islands are therefore not only scenic margins. They enter the chain of suspicion and help keep the difference between an apparent death and a confirmed identity unresolved. Near the end, Jeanette and Jens Hurtig stand together on the roof of police headquarters and look out across the Stockholm night while waiting for a helicopter. Their silence follows a decision to travel north quickly with support from the response unit. The view does not solve the case, but it marks a moment of shared resolve within the city where their investigation has taken shape.

Narrative significance

Stockholm’s importance lies in the way it connects spaces with different kinds of knowledge. A home reveals habitual routines; a metro-station cordon begins a case; police offices turn names into provisional relationships; streets and parks carry histories that exceed the present scene. The city’s landmarks and changing weather keep the investigation anchored in ordinary urban life, while its routes and hidden pasts make that life difficult to read at a glance.

The novel repeatedly pairs the visible city with uncertainty about what can be known. A person may leave little trace, a familiar professional name may unexpectedly recur, and a place may contain earlier histories beneath its present appearance. From the solitude of the Forest Cemetery to the crowded work of the headquarters, Stockholm offers no single viewpoint from which everything becomes clear. Instead, its many locations allow separate lives and strands of evidence to meet, making the city itself a structure of connection, concealment, and belated recognition.