You can discover new things by changing your perspective and your location

Simon’s advice, “You can discover new things by changing your perspective and your location,” makes a change of viewpoint both a practical investigative method and a concise statement of the novel’s concern with how people learn to see what they have missed. It recurs as Simon’s confirmation that Kari has applied that method: a shift in position exposes the connection the killer has tried to conceal.

The Advice in Practice

Simon gives Kari a yellow marble and an empty shell, then tells her that changing perspective and location can compensate for blind spots. The objects are concrete remnants of the investigation, but his instruction is not simply to inspect them more closely. It asks Kari to reconsider the angle from which she has been interpreting the evidence.

The scene makes that reconsideration physical. After getting into the car, Simon checks carefully in both directions before pulling onto the road. Kari notices his caution and has a new insight of her own: rationality is built on experience. The thought prepares the ground for the investigative point of the advice. Judgment is not detached from where someone stands or what experience has taught them to notice.

The Changed Angle

Simon later identifies his own earlier mistake in the shooting that killed Agnete Iversen. He had considered the angle from the doorway to the kitchen wall, but his theory assumed a right-handed shooter. If the killer had fired from the spot Simon first believed, the shooter would have left a footprint in the soft soil beside the flagstone path. The absence of such a print makes sense once Simon recognizes that the killer fired with the left hand and stood with both feet on the flagstones.

This correction does more than resolve one detail. It forces Simon to acknowledge poor police work and to revise the perspective from which he had read the scene. The apparently missing footprint is not an inexplicable gap: the mistaken assumption about the shooter’s handedness produced the blind spot.

Recognition and Significance

Kari draws the broader inference from Simon’s correction. Agnete is connected to the three victims, and the killer has taken great pains to keep investigators from noticing that connection because it could identify him. Simon responds by praising Kari for changing her perspective and location, and for being able to see. The advice thus passes from instruction to demonstrated insight: Kari moves from the physical evidence to the hidden relation that gives it significance.

The expression joins sight to method without treating seeing as a passive act. Evidence can remain in plain view while a faulty angle or assumption prevents it from becoming legible. Its recurrence also marks a difference between Simon’s earlier error and his later conduct: he makes his mistaken reading explicit, while Kari uses the revised perspective to identify the pattern. The line’s force lies in that movement from a literal change of position to a disciplined willingness to reconsider what the evidence means.