Vigilante justice in the name of punishment

Vigilante justice in the name of punishment is a recurring moral logic in the novel, where private acts of judgment arise amid institutional corruption and grave crimes. It is presented neither as a simple substitute for law nor as uncomplicated justice: a killer can resemble an avenging figure, while those who claim authority to punish may themselves exploit, threaten, and harm others. The tension becomes especially clear in Simon’s attempt to interpret a pattern of killings and in Sonny’s confrontations with people connected to trafficking and murder.

A Pattern Read as Retribution

Simon considers whether Kalle Farrisen’s death was meant to send a message. He connects its apparent cause—respiratory failure following an overdose—to the deaths of some of Kalle’s customers, and wonders whether the killer is acting like an avenging angel. The image gives the violence a language of judgment: the deaths appear to answer earlier harms rather than serve only as private revenge. Yet the scene remains an investigation, not a vindication. Simon is testing a possible explanation, and Kari points out that Agnete Iversen does not fit the same logic as far as they know. The pattern is therefore suggestive but incomplete, and the apparent moral order does not resolve who has the right to punish.

That uncertainty echoes an earlier account of rumors about a mole in the police force who leaked information to the person controlling much of Oslo’s drug and sex trafficking. Simon tells Kari that the rumors were never supported by evidence sufficient to prove either the mole or the figure behind the network existed. He identifies that figure as the Twin, but this disclosure does not yet establish the full structure of the corruption. The gap between what is suspected and what can be proved matters: private punishment may appear to answer crimes that official institutions have not exposed, while the hidden network makes reliable judgment difficult.

Sonny’s Claimed Grounds for Punishment

Sonny makes the moral question direct when he asks whether it is desirable behavior to let a dog attack a girl who is trying to escape slavery, and whether the people responsible should be punished. He rejects the framing of the incident as an accident. He tells Fidel Lae that the owner later killed the girl and abandoned her body in a forest, then names Hugo Nestor as the owner. In this exchange, Sonny’s demand for punishment is tied to a specific account of exploitation and killing, rather than to an abstract claim that offenders deserve retribution.

Sonny’s questions also expose the danger of turning punishment into a license for coercion. He confronts Fidel, who is armed and denies knowing anything about the case, and presses him to take a position on what should be done to the owners. The novel supplies Sonny’s accusation and the name he gives, but the exchange does not establish a legal process or independent adjudication. His moral certainty sits outside formal procedure, where the risks of error and private force remain present even when the accusation concerns severe wrongdoing.

Punishment Inside Corrupt Systems

The criminal network does not merely evade institutions; it uses people and procedures within them. Nestor’s account of Kjersti Morsand’s murder shows how a demand for a fall person was arranged through a corrupt prison officer and Arild Franck. Yngve Morsand wanted to kill his wife himself, while Nestor’s organization arranged for Sonny to be blamed. The agreed price was three million kroner. The scheme makes punishment part of a criminal service: a life sentence is treated as a purchasable outcome, and a vulnerable person is positioned to bear responsibility for another man’s act.

The same network’s reach appears in Simon’s confrontation with Iver Iversen. Simon says that Iversen Property did business with the Twin, laundering money from drug dealing and trafficking in exchange for fictitious losses used to reduce taxes by hundreds of millions of kroner. Iver denies knowing the Twin, but Simon says he has evidence of their cooperation. These allegations place financial transactions alongside the police and prison corruption already described. In that setting, official authority cannot be assumed to deliver justice, but the existence of corruption does not by itself make every private act of punishment just.

A diary entry attributed to Ab Lofthus makes the network’s design more explicit. Ab writes that there are two corrupt police officers, not one, and that their partnership allows one to have an alibi when the other is active. They have turned a blind eye to drugs, trafficking, and murder. He also records anonymous communication through separate Hotmail addresses and stolen computers taken from the evidence room, with messages exchanged through physical drops. The diary connects the long-standing mole rumors to an organized method of concealment. Against that structure, the idea of a solitary avenger is inadequate: wrongdoing is protected by interlocking relationships, money, information, and institutional access.

Threats, Confession, and the Limits of Justice

Punishment is also invoked as intimidation. At Staten, Franck uses a prisoner’s fear of an earlier death in cell 317 to make him comply, then threatens Johannes Halden by saying he can end his access to cancer treatment unless he reveals where Sonny is. Halden refuses to be controlled by the threat and answers that he has lived long enough and believes his sins have been forgiven. The exchange puts two competing claims of authority beside each other: Franck wields the prison’s power over a prisoner’s care, while Halden frames his own response through conscience and forgiveness. Franck’s coercion is not restorative justice; it is institutional power used to extract information.

The novel sharpens that distinction when Sonny reaches Franck’s office. After disarming him, Sonny binds Franck to his chair and takes his wallet and car key. Franck thinks of Sonny’s record of deaths, but also remembers that the boy grew up in the prison and had shown little capacity for violence apart from one incident involving Halden. The scene complicates the image of Sonny as a straightforward instrument of punishment: the act of restraining Franck is itself an exercise of force, while Franck’s assumptions are unsettled by the contrast between the feared criminal and the boy he recalls.

Nestor’s final encounter with the man he calls a lawyer turns punishment into a promise with a double edge. The stranger tells Nestor he needs to be punished and asks whether he wants to ease his conscience first. After Nestor provides information, the man tells him that the people he has helped may now be rescued. He then clarifies, through his actions, that his promise not to shoot Nestor did not mean he would spare him: he unlocks the enclosure holding the dogs. The sequence joins a potentially life-saving consequence to the threatened punishment of Nestor, resisting any easy division between mercy and vengeance.

Elsewhere, the criminal group’s own punitive logic is openly instrumental. A man tells Sonny that he is not chiefly concerned about missing money or drugs; he has promised Bo that Bo may cut Sonny into pieces, and treats the stolen goods as an investment in motivation. This threat is not justice in disguise but a means of enforcing loyalty and extracting information, including the whereabouts of Sylvester. Set against Sonny’s insistence that those responsible for trafficking and murder should be punished, it shows how readily the language and practice of punishment can be appropriated by power. The novel’s recurring question is not simply whether offenders should face consequences, but who is judging, what evidence supports the judgment, and whether punishment protects the vulnerable or reproduces the violence it claims to answer.