![]() Wallander is having enough trouble dealing with his messy personal life. A wave of anti-immigrant violence and hysteria is on the verge of being unleashed. When an elderly couple are brutally assualted and murdered in their rural home in an apparently motiveless crime, the initial clues make some citizens think that someone in the flood of immigrants seeking asylum following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe is responsible. Written in 1990, this book introduced Wallander as a police detective in a backwater town in Sweden. Just go with it.) I liked it quite a bit and since I also loved the The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I decided to read some more about these murderous Swedes. (Yes, it had English actors playing Swedes and was filmed in Sweden. The author (1948-2015) from ĭuring one of my periodic efforts to prove to myself that I'm not one of The Great Unwashed, I watched PBS's Masterpiece Mystery series featuring the Swedish detective Kurt Wallander as played by Kenneth Branagh. There’s a bit of local color of Sweden and I liked the map that allows you to follow the action around the southern section of the country, especially around Ystad, a real city where the detective is based. ![]() I thought it was a very good mystery and better than the other one I read and reviewed, The Man Who Smiled. This book is the first in the series of eleven. The style of the Wallander series is that of a police procedural. Wallander and his team have to investigate these additional crimes as these Nazis murder one man, injure others, and set fire to a local immigrant refugee camp. This gets leaked to the press and starts a frenzy of anti-immigrant feelings among the neo-Nazi types of Sweden who want immigration to cease and foreigners to be deported. The only initial clue is that the female victim said the word ‘foreigner’ just before she died. The main crime to be solved is the brutal torture and murder of an elderly farm couple who lived in an isolated house. And gaining weight because without his wife cooking, he eats only junk food. The detective’s elderly father lives alone in a farmhouse and is getting dementia, walking through the fields with suitcases in the night. He is estranged from his wayward daughter who travels around the world not telling her parents where she is and appearing unexpectedly for brief times. He may be falling in love with a beautiful young prosecutor, but she is married. His wife left him three months ago and she is filing for divorce. But Swedish detective Kurt Wallander has so many things going on that it would take a full hour with Dr. (Mar.All detectives have to have their personality quirks and personal problems to keep the story interesting. Also, American readers may find odd Mankell's bundling of his upright anti-racism message with broad notions of what constitutes acceptable social control. But he provides essential information only at the last minute, which makes the solution feel more like an appendix than a conclusion. ![]() Mankell is clearly a skilled writer, and his portrait of Wallender (who periodically slides beneath respectability) is effective. However, a leak to the press complicates the investigation by arousing anti-immigrant feelings, some of which are expressed in anonymous threats. Wallender puts those clues on the back burner when he learns that Johannes, ostensibly a simple farmer, had a secret life involving wealth and connections unknown to his wife. Rydberg, a police force old-timer, says the noose's unusual knot and the word foreigner, which Maria uttered before she died, are important. Such consolations can't help him absorb the scene at the Lovgren farm, where elderly Johannes Lovgren has been brutally beaten and stabbed to death and where his wife, Maria, is found barely alive with a noose around her neck. Since his wife walked out on him, Kurt Wallender, a middle-aged cop in the small town of Lenarp, has drowned his sorrows in opera and far too much liquor. In his first appearance in English, Swedish bestselling author Mankell combines thriller-quality entertainment with a depiction of anti-foreigner prejudice in Sweden, painted here as a very chilly place indeed.
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