Tag: Henning Mankell

Day 142: The Man from Beijing

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Cover for The Man from BeijingBefore I read The Man from Beijing, I heard it was really good, but I personally think Henning Mankell is better when he restrains the scope of his novels and refrains from long political discussions. This novel is not one of Mankell’s Kurt Wallander mysteries, but a stand-alone.

Almost everyone in a small village in remote Sweden is brutally murdered. Judge Birgitta Roslin figures out that one elderly couple was her mother’s foster parents, so she decides to go to the village and investigate.

The police are quickly convinced that the murderer is a local petty criminal, but Roslin finds diaries written by an immigrant ancestor of one of the elderly victims that she thinks may provide clues to the crime. Roslin’s story is periodically interrupted by a flashback describing the events following a man’s kidnapping in China in 1863 after he is brought to America to work on the railroad.

In the meantime, Ya Ru, a powerful Chinese businessman, is plotting a further acquisition of power and waiting to hear about the revenge he planned against the family of a man who harmed his ancestor. The novel travels to China, London, and Africa. It involves political plotting and maneuvering, corruption, and racism.

I thought the motive for the original murders was ridiculous. I also found many of the characters to be one-dimensional.

This novel is the second stand-alone I have read by Mankell, but unusually for me (because I often tire of series mysteries), I have preferred the Wallander novels. Both stand-alone novels are set partially in Africa, where Mankell lives part of the year. This novel is an improvement on the other one, which I thought was poorly written and extremely depressing, but it still has major flaws.

Day 44: The Dogs of Riga

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Cover for The Dogs of RigaHenning Mankell was my introduction to Swedish crime fiction. I usually enjoy his mysteries, but have not really liked his “more serious” novels. The Dogs of Riga is another of his mysteries featuring Inspector Kurt Wallender.

In a novel set earlier in time than his previous mysteries, Wallender travels to Latvia in the days before the dissolution of the Soviet Union to discover why Major Liepa, a Latvian police inspector who has been working on a case with him, is murdered as soon as he returns home. Wallender is bewildered by the politics and workings of the deeply depressed country. He soon figures out that the person arrested for the murder is innocent.

Wallender responds to the pleas for help by Liepa’s widow, Baipa Liepa, to continue his investigation further than the Latvian officials want him to. He encounters widespread governmental corruption and the realities of living in this grim regime. Readers of Mankell’s books have heard of Baipa Liepa, because she is the woman he loves in books that take place in a later timeframe.

Wallender is his usual depressed self, eating bad food and getting little sleep. The setting of urban Riga, though, is much more dark than Mankell’s usual setting of rural Sweden.

I enjoyed the book, although I thought that Wallender seemed strikingly naive at times. Mankell’s writing is sometimes a little awkward, although it is usually spare and transparent.