Summary

Police opens with a prologue that sketches the provenance of a specific automatic pistol called a Russian Odessa. It has traveled with Cossacks in Lithuania to Siberia and entered Norway with Rudolf Asayev, head of the narcotics market in Oslo, who traffics in a heroin-like opioid violin. The prologue ends with a reference to a comatose hospital patient and the hope that the patient will never regain consciousness.

Chapter 1 starts out on a beautiful fall day that finds recently retired detective Erlend Vennesla charging uphill on his racing bike to Lake Maridal, where he turns into a familiar forest. Ten years earlier at the same time, date, and place, a young girl, who had been locked up and raped for three days, had escaped her captor and run into the forest for safety, but instead had met her death. Erlend, working under...