Norway functions as the investigation’s connecting geography: victims’ movements through cities and transport systems converge on remote mountain huts, where distance, weather, and limited access shape what can be witnessed and what the police can do. The novel’s Norwegian setting is not just a backdrop; the route between inhabited places and isolated terrain becomes part of the evidence.

Cities, transport, and the victims’ movements

In Oslo, Borgny Stem-Myhre left the Mono after an evening event and told a friend that she was going home to prepare for a photo shoot. Investigators assumed she would head to a taxi stand, but no driver working nearby recognized her in the available images or recalled a journey to Sagene. She was not seen again until two Polish construction workers found the basement door’s padlock broken and discovered her body inside. The gap between a public night out and an unseen journey home makes the city’s ordinary transport routes a conspicuous absence in the case.

Railway records supplied a more definite connection between city and mountain. Adele Vetlesen, a missing 28-year-old from Drammen, had bought an online train ticket to Ustaoset for November 7. Borgny had bought a ticket from Kongsberg to the same destination on the same date. The records placed two women on converging routes, but did not by themselves establish what happened to them after arrival.

Ustaoset and the hut route

Ustaoset is described as a mountain region rather than a conventional town. It has summer cabins and larger tourist association huts used by hikers travelling between mountain lodgings. That dispersed geography matters to the case: a destination that is not a major population centre nevertheless becomes a meeting point in the movements of several women connected to the murders.

A search of Iska Peller’s account showed charges on November 20 for two beds in each of four huts, spaced about a day’s walk apart. The route amounted to a four-day mountain trip, and its final hut, Hävasshütte, lay about half a day’s walk from Ustaoset. Investigators’ reconstruction placed Iska with Charlotte Lolles and placed Borgny and Marit Olsen in the immediate vicinity of Ustaoset. These findings established a geographic overlap and a plausible shared itinerary, not proof that every woman had been together throughout the journey.

The mountain setting also complicated interpretation of what had happened at Hävasshütte. Elias Skog later described waking in a moonlit night and seeing a man pull a woman into the outhouse while covering her mouth. At the time, he mistook the scene for consensual sex; after reading about the murders, he reconsidered whether the woman had been struggling to escape. The remote hut and the limited view from his window left the original observation ambiguous, but tied the Norwegian mountain route to a crucial witness account.

Snow, isolation, and police operations

The landscape around Hävasshütte is presented as a vast, nearly featureless expanse. Snow and wind smooth its contours until the terrain resembles a sea, with the mass of Hallingskarvet rising like a threatening wave. On a snowmobile journey, Kaja Solness checks her nose and cheeks against the risk of frostbite; when the engine stops, she calculates that they may be at least forty-five minutes from civilization, with a journey on skis taking hours. The setting turns distance into a practical danger rather than a scenic abstraction.

That isolation later becomes an operational advantage as well as a hazard. Harry Hole, Kaja Solness, and Jussi Kolkka arrive at Hävasshütte in the middle of the night, while other officers hide in groups around the valley, about three kilometres apart. The police choose the hut because their presence there is credible, because the killer may feel familiar enough with the place to strike, and because the valley’s approaches can be controlled: it is accessible from the northeast or south, while steep eastern cliffs and fissured ground to the west make other routes difficult. In the uninhabited mountains, only the Telenor network is available, so officers with other providers rely on walkie-talkies.

Norway as a chain of clues

The investigation’s map joins urban disappearance, rail travel, hut bookings, a witness’s mistaken interpretation, and the physical limits of mountain movement. At a press conference in Oslo, Mikael Bellman announces that Iska Peller will arrive from Australia and travel with an investigator to Hävasshütte to reconstruct the night of the crimes. The announcement is deliberately staged to reach the killer: the police present the visit as routine and Iska as a witness of limited importance, while intending to make the killer believe she may identify the other guests.

Norway’s geography thus serves both the puzzle and its misdirection. Tickets and accommodation records show connections among the victims, while the terrain explains why those connections are difficult to verify and why a witness could misread violence in the dark. When Harry learns that Tony Leike raped Adele at Hävasshütte, his first assumption does not fit what he knows; the subsequent realization that it was not a rape reframes the scene and its motive. The remote Norwegian setting holds the clues together, but does not make their meaning immediately clear.