For example, the banker Haraldur Rúriksson (himself a cipher for the real-life Björgólfur Guðmundsson), takes his patronym from the legendary viking founder of Kievan Rus'; the novel features a newspaper editor called Tómas Davíðsson, which name Þráinn himself used as a pen-name in his 1987 Tungumál fuglanna;[4] and the bank robbers Þorgeir and Þormóður are based on the eponymous foster-brothers of the medieval Icelandic Fóstbræðra saga.
[5] The book states that the troubling Russian connections of Haraldur Rúriksson can be read about in the journal EuroCapital, in a transparent allusion to an article in Euromoney.
He takes up the invitation of a one-time employee, Magnús Valgarðsson, and an associate of his, Cameron Stout, to go into the alcopop business in post-communist St Petersburg.
Rumours are reported that Haraldur defrauded his associates of their shares in the business just before it became enormously profitable and he successfully sells it to a major European brewery.
§I also introduces us to Haraldur's best friend, Rúnar; two boys in a violent foster-home, Þorgeirr and Þórmóður; a would-be priest turned detective, Víkingur; and two eastern European psychopaths, the Czech Petra Vlkova and the Russian Vasilí Basmanov, who become a couple and begin working for St Petersburg's pre-eminent oligarch, Mikhail Moisejevitsj Levítan (founding, it later emerges, a security company-cum-protection racket called Opritsjnina Group).