Kurt Wallander Mysteries (Playaway)

6 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 1 January 1999

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.

Firewall

by Henning Mankell

Published 1 January 1999

The mystery thriller series that inspired the Netflix crime drama Young Wallander.

From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the seventh riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series.

A body is found at an ATM the apparent victim of heart attack. Then two teenage girls are arrested for the brutal murder of a cab driver. The girls confess to the crime showing no remorse whatsoever. Two open and shut cases. At first these two incidents seem to have nothing in common, but as Wallander delves deeper into the mystery of why the girls murdered the cab driver he begins to unravel a plot much more involved complicated than he initially suspected. The two cases become one and lead to conspiracy that stretches to encompass a world larger than the borders of Sweden.

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 White Lioness

by Henning Mankell

Published 11 June 1998

Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award In peaceful Southern Sweden Louise Akerblom, an estate agent, pillar of the Methodist church, wife and mother, disappears. There is no explanation and no motive. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team are called in to investigate. As Inspector Wallander is introduced to this missing person's case he has a gut feeling that the victim will never be found alive but he has no idea how far he will have to go in search of the killer and the origin of the crime. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela has made his long walk to freedom, setting in train the country's painful journey towards the end of Apartheid. Wallander and his colleagues find themselves caught up in a complex web involving renegade members of South Africa's secret service and a former KGB agent, all of whom are set upon halting Mandela's rise to power. In an increasingly globalised world Wallander and his team are faced with international terrorism which knows no frontiers - they must prevent a hideous crime that means to dam the tide of history.