Oslo

Oslo is the novel’s principal urban setting: a city where a saturated, almost snowless winter shapes daily life, private routes become vulnerable to violence, and murder investigations unfold under the scrutiny of the press and the state. Its significance lies not only in serving as a backdrop but in the way its parks, institutions, streets, and weather organize what can be seen, concealed, and pursued.

Weather and the city’s surfaces

The winter in Oslo is markedly out of character. Weeks of mild, persistent rain leave the ground waterlogged; European highways are washed away, migratory birds no longer head for warmer regions, and insects appear farther north than anyone has previously seen them. The calendar says winter, but the lawns remain green rather than even turning brown. The city’s ordinary seasonal expectations have lost their footing: at Sogn, people in cross-country ski clothing jog in resignation, still hoping to ski at Sognsvann. The landscape is not simply picturesque or bleak; it has become materially unstable, with water and temperature altering roads, recreation, and the rhythm of the season.

On New Year’s Eve, dense fog makes fireworks audible from central Oslo as far as Asker while obscuring the rockets from view, even for people setting them off in their own gardens. The contrast between sound and sight gives the city a particular atmospheric quality: events are plainly occurring, but their visible form is withheld. That pattern resonates with the murder investigation, in which facts exist before the police have connected them. The killer’s own account likewise looks ahead to the police recognizing a link between murders that they have not yet detected. Oslo’s obscured winter thus accompanies, rather than explains, the delay between violence and understanding.

Parks, routes, and exposed spaces

Frogner Park is both a familiar recreational landscape and a setting shaped by who is likely to be present. Marit Olsen loves skiing in the mountains but hates jogging. She dislikes her breathlessness, the apparent trembling of the ground beneath her steps, and the imagined scrutiny of passers-by. To avoid being seen, she schedules her three weekly runs through the park for ten at night, when few people are around. She still has to make her way along paths that cross between a small number of lamps. The hour and lighting that offer her privacy also leave her moving through a sparsely watched public space.

The nearby Frognerbadet, the public open-air swimming facility within the park, becomes a different kind of exposed space after a murder. The park covers more than fifty hectares, but the fenced swimming area is comparatively small. Police can therefore secure the scene by cordoning off the entire fence and stationing an officer at the entrance. Reporters circle the perimeter, treating access to images as a public entitlement because the victim is a prominent member of the Storting. The scene stages a conflict between protecting a crime site and turning it into public spectacle: the fence can keep people out, but it also gives the press a boundary to work around.

Oslo’s violence is not confined to its most public spaces. In another case, Borgny Stem-Myhre is last seen after leaving the Mono. Investigators consider whether she might have gone to a taxi rank, but none of the drivers whose records are checked recognizes her or recalls a trip to Sagene. Two Polish bricklayers later find a forced padlock on a basement door and discover her body inside. The account emphasizes the gap between a person’s last known public movement and the enclosed space in which she is found. The city’s social venues, transport possibilities, and hidden interiors belong to the same investigative map, though they offer very different degrees of visibility.

Institutions and the centre of power

The city centre is described through Mikael Bellman’s evening walk along Karl Johans gate. At the heart of the Norwegian kingdom, the street places the university and knowledge on one side, the National Theatre and culture on the other, the royal residence behind him, and political power ahead. Three hundred steps bring Bellman to the Storting at exactly eight o’clock. The building is not especially large or imposing, and its principal guards are two granite lions flanking the entrance. The measured walk turns Oslo’s institutional geography into a sequence: knowledge, culture, monarchy, and parliamentary authority are close enough to be traversed on foot.

That political centre intersects with the police investigation. The murder inquiry grows to a group of thirty-six people, three times the size of a normal murder investigation. Its scale reflects the difficulty and public importance of the case, but it does not guarantee a result. Bellman has allowed the group to celebrate the arrest of Tony Leike as a supposed triumph even though the investigators have worked for a long time without a genuine breakthrough. Oslo’s institutions can assemble personnel and command public attention; the arrest also shows how easily the appearance of progress can get ahead of what the evidence establishes.

The city’s police buildings are workplaces as well as stages for jurisdiction and authority. Harry Hole and Björn Holm arrive at the Kriminalamt to find that Bellman and the investigation group are in a meeting. Harry enters without knocking; seven people turn toward him, while Bellman, seated at the head of the table facing the door, does not need to turn. In that room, physical arrangement makes the chain of command visible. Later, Bellman publicly thanks Harry for his assistance and announces that he is being returned to the Morddezernat because the group no longer needs his specialist knowledge. He presents the decision as an orderly conclusion, even while Harry privately compares Bellman’s resilience to that of a cockroach repeatedly flushed down a toilet. The institutional language of closure and the investigator’s hostile assessment occupy the same Oslo scene.

Arrival, departure, and investigative reach

Oslo is also a point of arrival. A Volvo Amazon—the last of its model to leave the factory in 1970—stops at the pedestrian crossing outside the arrivals terminal at Oslo Airport, Gardermoen. The specific, old-fashioned car makes an incongruous entrance into the contemporary setting of an airport terminal. The scene gives the city an edge as well as a centre: people and stories enter through its transport infrastructure, while the investigation must connect events that may have taken place elsewhere.

The police search for links beyond the city. A missing woman, Adele Vetlesen, is reported by her partner in November; a state railway ticket record shows that she bought a ticket online from Drammen to Ustaoset for November 7. Borgny Stem-Myhre bought a ticket from Kongsberg to the same destination on that date. Separately, Iska Peller’s account is charged for two beds in each of four association huts, spaced roughly a day’s walk apart. These details extend the inquiry into routes and remote accommodation rather than locating all relevant action in Oslo. The city’s role is that of an investigative and administrative hub from which records, movements, and possible connections are assembled.

The distinction between urban investigation and distant terrain becomes especially sharp in the account of Kaja Solness travelling by snowmobile. Snow and wind have smoothed the landscape until the Hallingskarvet massif rises like a threatening wave from a sea-like expanse. The contrast clarifies what Oslo is and is not in the novel: the city concentrates police, political authority, reporters, and the records of movement, while the investigation’s reach carries its participants into isolated landscapes where those urban systems cannot themselves provide witnesses or protection.

Narrative function

Oslo gathers the novel’s public and private pressures into one setting. Its green winter lawns and fog make familiar surroundings strange; its park paths allow a runner to seek solitude but also leave her poorly observed; its fenced swimming facility contains a crime scene while drawing reporters to its perimeter. The same city places Bellman within walking distance of political power and places Harry inside institutions that can assign, dismiss, and publicly frame his role.

The setting also supports the story’s controlled release of information. The police have not yet recognized the connection between murders, while the killer anticipates that they soon will. In the meantime, the reader encounters individual spaces and fragments—an evening route, an unrecognized taxi possibility, a locked basement, a ticket record, a conference room—before the larger pattern becomes legible. Oslo is therefore more than the place where the investigation happens: its routes and institutions give the investigation its structure, while its obscured views make the difference between seeing an event and understanding it part of the city’s narrative meaning.