Norwegian National Criminal Investigation Service (Kripos)

The Norwegian National Criminal Investigation Service (Kripos) is the national specialist body brought into murder investigations across Norway and, as a rule, given the lead. Its formal reach is presented as a practical resource for complicated cases, but the novel makes that mandate contentious: who leads an investigation also determines who controls its information, claims its results, and shapes the future distribution of police authority.

Identity and national mandate

Kripos is introduced to Harry Hole through an identification card carried by a Finnish officer. The card identifies him as an employee of the agency’s Oslo central unit and explains that Kripos is called into murder cases throughout the country and generally leads the investigation. This encounter establishes the organization not as a distant administrative label but as an operational force entering the investigation of murders already under way.

Its stated purpose is to provide specialist assistance to local police when a murder case is complicated. Gunnar Hagen argues that the Oslo police have the country’s largest homicide unit and should be able to decide which cases they can handle alone, when they need help, and which should be handed over entirely. In this view, national expertise is a resource to be deployed in partnership with local forces, not a standing claim to command every major case.

A dispute over jurisdiction

The conflict concerns more than the handling of one investigation. Police leaders are debating whether a small country such as Norway can justify maintaining two specialist departments with overlapping powers: Oslo’s violent-crime unit and Kripos. Kripos’s new deputy director, Mikael Bellman, renews the debate by interpreting the rules so that Kripos can decide for itself whether a major murder case belongs to the national agency or to the local police authority. Previously, the decision had rested the other way around.

That change reverses the balance between assistance and control. Hagen objects that local police should retain the ability to judge their own capacity and to draw on local knowledge, while Kripos should contribute expertise when a case requires it. He warns that concentrating all murder investigations in a single competence center risks narrowness and institutional insularity, and would weaken the value of local knowledge, varied professional experience, and the recruitment of new personnel. These are not abstract concerns: under the proposed arrangement, a local department could lose both the case and the authority to decide what help it needs.

The Norwegian Ministry of Justice enters the argument over efficiency and limited resources. Its interest, as Hagen describes it, is in determining whether Kripos can demonstrate better results when it no longer has to defer to local police forces. A successful centralization would therefore give the national agency more than a particular case; it could provide the justification for consolidating murder investigations under one competence center. The struggle over jurisdiction becomes a contest over what counts as effective policing and which institution is allowed to prove it.

Bellman, Kolkka, and institutional change

Bellman’s return to Kripos gives the jurisdictional campaign a visible leader. After police training and a short period working in Norway, he had gone to Europol in The Hague. He returns as the agency’s deputy director with ambitions to advance within it, and controversy begins when he tries to appoint a former Europol colleague, Jussi Kolkka, a Finn.

Kolkka has police training in Finland but lacks the formal qualifications required to hold Norwegian police status. The union protests, and the arrangement is made through a temporary exchange appointment. The episode shows how the agency’s attempt to strengthen its position operates on two levels: Kripos presses to expand its authority over cases while Bellman works to shape its personnel. The temporary appointment resolves the immediate qualification problem, but it does not remove the broader dispute over who gets to define the agency’s scope.

The Oslo murders and the struggle for control

The conflict sharpens when Charlotte Lolles is found dead behind a Datsun and Oslo investigators notice similarities to the earlier murder of Borgny Stem-Myhre in a basement. Both bodies were found in Oslo, but Kripos insists that the two murders constitute a double homicide within its remit and begins investigating independently. The case becomes an immediate test of the proposed transfer of power; those involved understand that the Ministry’s future support for centralization may depend on its outcome.

The institutional rivalry also obstructs the work. Bellman refuses to share Kripos’s information with Oslo police, while the investigation is at a standstill. He turns again to the Ministry, and the Oslo police chief receives word that the Ministry would welcome Kripos taking over the case until jurisdiction is settled. For the local department, this is not a neutral pause in procedure: the contested agency is already investigating on its own, while the ministry’s intervention could formalize its control before the dispute is resolved.

Narrative significance

Kripos’s role binds the murder inquiry to a larger struggle over professional boundaries. The agency has a credible national function—supporting complex investigations—and the debate is not simply between competence and incompetence. It is between centralized specialist authority and a model in which local departments retain decision-making power and contribute their knowledge of place and personnel. The murder cases expose how quickly that disagreement can affect the circulation of evidence and the progress of an investigation.

The novel also makes institutional success politically consequential. If Kripos produces results, those results can be used to support a permanent concentration of authority; if information is withheld and the inquiry stalls, the claimed advantage of centralization becomes harder to separate from the power struggle that produced it. Kripos is therefore both an investigative body and a stake in the story’s conflict: the question of who can solve the murders is inseparable from the question of who will be permitted to control the next investigation.