The Snowman

Katrine is a strong, powerful woman and a newly appointed officer in the Oslo police department. She is also very attractive, but downplays her looks, unless she can use them to her advantage, such as when she attracts Arve Støp to gain access to his apartment. As a character, Katrine pushes back against gender roles, often leaving her coworkers confused or angry when she refuses to act the way they think an attractive woman should. To further make this distinction, Katrine wears men’s cologne, which Harry notices: “It wasn’t like anything he had ever known a woman to wear. Very spicy, nothing sweet about it” (122). Throughout the novel, Katrine consistently operates outside of the bounds of what men expect from an attractive woman.

Katrine enters the story early, claiming to have been assigned to Harry, although he finds out later that she had talked her way onto his team, and hadn’t, in fact, been assigned to him. Katrine wants on Harry’s team because for Katrine, the Snowman case is more personal than Harry could have known. She is Gert Rafto’s daughter and joined the police at the age of 19 with the express purpose of clearing her father’s name.

In many ways, she parallels Harry with her obsessive character and willingness to step outside the bounds of police protocol to follow her intuition. Before he knows her true identity, he is aware of her behavior when he finds out that she was a promising officer in Bergen before she got obsessed with a case and lost her marriage as a result. In Katrine, Harry and others see an intensity that they don’t understand. Harry feels that he understands her more once he uncovers her connection to Gert Rafto. Katrine’s intensity manifests to him, and others, as a gleam in her eyes, which is a motif that runs throughout the novel.

Rakel is Harry’s ex-girlfriend. As she admits, she loves Harry but is unable to maintain a relationship with him because of his obsession with his work and the way it affects his mental health. Rakel’s son is Oleg, whose biological father lives in Russia. Harry has become a father to Oleg, a relationship which Rakel encourages. Harry calls Rakel “Cochineal,” a reference to Campari, her signature drink, and her predilection for wearing red. Cochineal is a motif throughout the novel and will come full circle when, at the end, Mathias dresses Rakel in a red dress when he stages her death.

After breaking up with Harry, Rakel chose to date Mathias because he is stable, kind, and focused on her. She also wants to give Oleg, her son, a better father figure, but Oleg still only has that connection with Harry. Although she knows that Mathias is theoretically the perfect partner, Rakel still finds herself coming to Harry’s house and continuing their sexual relationship. She admits that she and Harry have the chemistry that she and Mathias lack. Every time she goes to his apartment, she says it will be the last time, yet she is unable to completely cut the connection. With the reveal that Mathias is the Snowman, Rakel suddenly becomes a part of Harry’s professional life as well. As a result of Mathias’s wish to engage with Harry, he has targeted Rakel, and their relationship has been a sham that will, in the end, put her and Oleg’s lives in danger.

When the reader first meets Mathias, he is Rakel’s current boyfriend. He is a doctor, and throughout the investigation, Harry uses his expertise and his personal relationship with Idar Vetlesen to further the investigation.

Mathias’s career as a serial killer begins when, as a child, he kills his mother. The impetus is a traumatic event in which Mathias builds a snowman, sits atop it, and looks in a window to see his mother having sex with a man who is not his father. Even more traumatically, he sees that, like himself, this man has no nipples, and he immediately understands that this man is his biological father. This new understanding, coupled with the snowman connection, creates both his motivation and his methodology for choosing his victims. Mathias sees himself as an avenger, dispensing justice by killing women who have children that are not their husbands’, and develops a complex system that even accounts for disposing of the bodies at the Anatomy Department.

In Part 5, Mathias is revealed as The Snowman, the serial killer of the novel. As Mathias, he helps Harry with the investigation and remains a background character through his involvement with Rakel. However, as the Snowman, he is omnipresent as a constant voice and driver of the action, engaging directly with Harry through his crimes. He also controls the “game,” but falls into the typical tropes of the serial killer, thinking he is smarter than everyone else and engages with Harry on a personal level, becoming more interested in hunting the hunter.