Svartsjölandet is the setting of a pivotal crime scene in Jeanette Kihlberg’s investigation of murdered boys. The discovery of Yuri Krylov’s body there turns the investigation from a single case into a suspected series, while evidence gathered in the area later links the crime to Viggo Dürer’s villa at Hundudden. The location also carries a separate narrative image of an isolated boy beside a broken bicycle: a place where apparent openness and remoteness meet the vulnerability of children left without protection.

Setting and Discovery

For Jeanette, Svartsjölandet is first encountered as the destination of an urgent call from Hurtig. She drives there to lead the investigation after an elderly couple exercising outdoors find a boy’s body by a jetty. The scene is at once specific and exposed: a waterside discovery in a landscape that the narrative also presents through a long, empty road. The contrast matters. The road can seem uninhabited, but it is not safe; the jetty offers no shelter from what has happened there.

Unlike the boy found at Thorildsplan, this victim can be identified. He is Yuri Krylov, a boy from Belarus who had been reported missing in early March after disappearing from an immigration centre outside Upplands Väsby. The migration board has no record of relatives for him, either in Sweden or in his home country. His identification gives the investigation a name and a recent point of disappearance, but the absence of family ties also marks how little social protection surrounds him. Svartsjölandet is therefore not simply a remote place where a crime is discovered: it is where the case of a missing, isolated child becomes visible to the authorities.

Evidence and the Emerging Pattern

At the jetty, Jeanette examines the scene with Ivo Andrić. The condition of Yuri’s body indicates that it has been in the water for an extended period. The medical findings also show extreme violence and deliberate bodily alteration, with a pattern resembling what investigators have seen in the earlier case. Jeanette concludes that the two deaths are probably the work of the same perpetrator and that the police are dealing with a double murder. Her fear that more boys may die gives the scene its forward urgency: it is both a place of discovery and a warning that the killer may not have finished.

The physical traces are few and inconclusive. Investigators find two shoe prints, one large and one much smaller, nearly child-sized, as well as tyre tracks from a vehicle. Forensics makes casts, but their value depends on finding something against which to compare them. These details leave the crime scene suspended between evidence and uncertainty. The prints suggest more than one scale of presence, while the tracks imply that a vehicle may have played a part; neither clue, on its own, identifies a perpetrator. The case gains force through the accumulation of similarities with the earlier murder rather than through a single decisive discovery at the jetty.

Road, Isolation, and Vulnerability

Another passage associated with Svartsjölandet follows a long, empty stretch of road before a woman comes upon a boy alone beside a broken bicycle. He needs a lift and trusts the people he encounters; the narration stresses that he has not learned to recognize those who have been let down. This encounter is not identified as Yuri’s discovery, and the road episode should not be confused with the jetty crime scene. Its significance lies instead in how it develops the location’s association with exposed children and uncertain safety.

The narrative then shows a room prepared for a staged performance: a bulb hangs from the ceiling, and a sturdy iron boathook is fixed to the wall opposite a concealed door to the living room. A boy is undressed, fitted with a choker chain, and secured to the hook with a longer chain. These details place confinement beside the apparently open landscape, without establishing that the room is at the jetty or identifying it as the precise site of Yuri’s murder. Read together, the road and room create a disturbing contrast between a child’s ordinary need for help and a space organized to control him. Svartsjölandet becomes associated not only with the aftermath of violence, but with the gap between what a vulnerable child needs and what an adult may exploit.

The Vehicle and the Wider Investigation

The early vehicle inquiry does not immediately solve that gap. Jeanette assigns Åhlund and Schwarz to determine whether Karl Lundström’s blue Volvo is the vehicle that scraped a tree at Svartsjölandet. Their first analysis does not support the identification: the paint shades do not match. The distinction is important, because the resemblance between vehicles is initially only a lead, not proof. At this point, the landscape holds a trace of a vehicle, but investigators cannot yet connect it reliably to a suspect.

Later, testing changes the status of that clue. Jeanette learns that paint samples taken from the car at Dürer’s villa are identical to the traces found at Svartsjölandet. She consequently considers whether Dürer could have been the person who left the boy by the jetty. The physical match gives the investigation a concrete connection between the crime scene and the lawyer’s property, where a car had been kept under a tarpaulin. The inquiry’s earlier hesitation over the Volvo and its different paint shades is not erased; rather, the later match supplies a stronger, separately grounded link to Dürer’s vehicle.

Svartsjölandet also becomes part of the case’s documentary record. In the search at Dürer’s villa, investigators find copies of his photographs of the bodies associated with Thorildsplan, Svartsjölandet, Danvikstull, and Barnängen. The sequence places Yuri’s death within a wider set of crimes, while preserving the distinction between the separate locations. The Svartsjölandet evidence thus contributes to an investigative chain made up of physical traces, comparisons among cases, and material recovered elsewhere.

Narrative Significance

The location’s role expands as the series of murders comes into view. Yuri’s discovery is the second of the boy murders under investigation, and the first substantial likeness to the earlier case persuades Jeanette that she is facing a repeat offender. The third boy is later found at Danvikstull, four weeks after the first; that separate discovery reinforces the continuing pattern without making Danvikstull part of Svartsjölandet. The novel repeatedly distinguishes the sites while allowing their recurring evidence to connect them.

The case does not end with the resolution of the four murders under investigation. The material recovered at Dürer’s villa points to evidence concerning another forty bodies, and the files are to be passed to Europol. Those additional cases are not all located at Svartsjölandet. Their presence in the final scale of the investigation instead shows how one apparently bounded crime scene opens onto a much larger network of violence. Svartsjölandet’s narrative significance rests in that change of scale: a jetty where one missing boy is found becomes an evidentiary point from which the police trace a repeated method, a vehicle, and the wider reach of Dürer’s crimes.