Kurt Wallender Mystery S.

5 total works

Faceless Killers

by Henning Mankell

Published 20 April 2000

Kurt Wallander is a hard-drinking, opera-loving Swedish police inspector. His personal life is falling apart. His wife has left him, his daughter won t acknowledge him and even his ageing father barely tolerates him. Then he is forced to confront an appalling crime. An old couple are brutally murdered in their remote farmhouse and suspicion falls on the immigrant community. Right wing racists are stirred into action by reports of the murder in the press. In Wallander Henning Markell has created an old-style policeman obliged to come to terms with a modern Sweden riven by violence and racial tension. In the first of the acclaimed Wallander novels, he mixes the elements of American noir fiction with a very European sense of melancholia and mortality. It is a world where crimes are solved as much by tireless drudgery as by flashes of inspiration and where truth, although still worth seeking, is elusive.

The Dogs of Riga

by Henning Mankell

Published 18 October 2001

Sweden, winter, 1991. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off. A few days later a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead.

The dead men were criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit. But what appears to be an open-and-shut case soon takes on a far more sinister aspect. Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea, to Riga in Latvia, where he is plunged into a frozen, alien world of police surveillance, scarcely veiled threats, and lies.

Doomed always to be one step behind the shadowy figures he pursues, only Wallander's obstinate desire to see that justice is done brings the truth to light.

Sidetracked

by Henning Mankell

Published 30 January 1998

His long-awaited vacation interrupted by two deaths, Inspector Kurt Wallander begins trying to piece together how the brutal murder of a former minister of justice is related to the self-immolation of an unidentified young woman.

One Step behind

by Henning Mankell

Published 1 January 1999

It is Midsummer's Eve, three young friends gather in a wood. In the still-sunlit Scandanavian dusk, they don costumes joyfully to enact - or so it appears to an unseen observer - a kind of masque. The hidden watcher soon brings their performance to an end. His approach is careful; his aim is perfect. Three bullets, three corpses. The murderer then carefully photographs the grisly tableau. The Ystad police station meanwhile is experiencing a summer lull, indeed Inspector Wallander is at last at liberty to attend to - albeit reluctantly - his deteriorating health, but his peace of mind is shattered when one of his colleagues is murdered. An unknown killer, seen by no-one, is on the loose, and the police's only lead is a photograph of three dead young people in costume. Forced to dig more deeply than he would have wanted into the personal life of one of his colleagues, Wallander's investigation reveals something none of his team could ever have imagined. However, they remain tantalisingly, terrifyingly one step behind the lethal progress of a killer Wallander would have to suppose was deranged if his methods were not so meticulous and his victims so clinically targeted.

The Fifth Woman

by Henning Mankell

Published 1 January 2000

Inspector Kurt Wallander is home from an idyllic holiday in Rome, full of energy and plans for the future. But when he investigates the disappearence of an elderly birdwatcher he discovers a gruesome and meticulously planned murder - a body impaled in a trap of sharpened bamboo poles. Then another man is reported missing. And once again Wallander's life is on hold as he and his team work tirelessly to find a link between the series of vicious murders. Forever battling to make sense of the violence of modern Sweden, Wallander leads a massive investigation to uncover a brutal killer.