First in the Kurt Wallander series.It was a senselessly violent crime: on a cold night in a remote Swedish farmhouse an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death, and his wife is left to die with a noose around her neck. And as if this didn’t present enough problems for the Ystad police Inspector Kurt Wallander, the dying woman’s last word is foreign, leaving the police the one tangible clue they have—and in the process, the match that could inflame Sweden’s already smoldering anti-immigrant sentiments.Unlike the situation with his ex-wife, his estranged daughter, or the beautiful but married young prosecutor who has peaked his interest, in this case, Wallander finds a problem he can handle. He quickly becomes obsessed with solving the crime before the already tense situation explodes, but soon comes to realize that it will require all his reserves of energy and dedication to solve.Amazon.com ReviewIf you remember with pleasure those dark and gloomy Martin Beck mysteries by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, you'll be glad to plunge into the first of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallender mysteries to appear in English. Wallender's personal life can occasionally seem more depressing than even a provincial Swedish detective should be asked to bear, but his investigative skills are strictly first rate. And Mankell's story of the brutal murder of an elderly farm couple uncovers an unusual aspect of life in modern Sweden--a streak of fear and prejudice against the many newcomers from Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe who have sought asylum there. From Publishers WeeklyIn 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. 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. 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. Rydberg, a police force old-timer, says the noose's unusual knot and the word foreigner, which Maria uttered before she died, are important. 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. However, a leak to the press complicates the investigation by arousing anti-immigrant feelings, some of which are expressed in anonymous threats. Mankell is clearly a skilled writer, and his portrait of Wallender (who periodically slides beneath respectability) is effective. But he provides essential information only at the last minute, which makes the solution feel more like an appendix than a conclusion. Also, American readers may find odd Mankell's bundling of his upright anti-racism message with broad notions of what constitutes acceptable social control. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Henning Mankell's first novel, never before released in English, explores the reflections of a working class man who has struggled against the constraints of his station for his entire life. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.The year is 1911. The young rock blaster Oskar Johansson has been killed in an accident. Or so it says in the local newspaper. In spite of serious injuries, however, Oskar survives. Decades later, Oskar looks back and reflects on his working life as an invalid, his marriage, his dreams, and his hopes. Oskar's life is woven together out of fragments of voices, images, and episodes that, taken together, provide a sharp and precise picture of life in Sweden for the working class.

Joel is growing up. He is getting interested in girls. Just look at his New Year's resolutions: to see a naked lady, to toughen himself up so that he can live to be a hundred, and to see the sea. They all look pretty impossible for a motherless boy in Northern Sweden. Especially as his sailor dad is keen to drown his sadness in drink, and all the local matrons are narrowly watching the pair of them. And then he saves old Simon from a frozen death in the woods, and Joel becomes a local hero.

SUMMARY: Second in the Kurt Wallander series.On the Swedish coastline, two bodies, victims of grisly torture and cold execution, are discovered in a life raft. With no witnesses, no motives, and no crime scene, Detective Kurt Wallander is frustrated and uncertain he has the ability to solve a case as mysterious as it is heinous. But after the victims are traced to the Baltic state of Latvia, a country gripped by the upheaval of Soviet disintegration, Major Liepa of the Riga police takes over the investigation. Thinking his work done, Wallander slips into routine once more, until suddenly, he is called to Riga and plunged into an alien world where shadows are everywhere, everything is watched, and old regimes will do anything to stay alive.

After killing a man in the line of duty, Kurt Wallander resolves to quit the Ystad police. However, a bizarre case gets under his skin. A lawyer driving home at night stops to investigate an effigy sitting in a chair in the middle of the highway. The lawyer is hit over the head and dies. Within a week the lawyer’s son is also killed. These deeply puzzling mysteries compel Wallander to remain on the force. The prime suspect is a powerful corporate mogul with a gleaming smile that Wallander believes hides the evil glee of a killer. Joined by Ann-Britt Hoglund, Wallander begins to uncover the truth, but the same merciless individuals responsible for the murders are now closing in on him.From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. First published in Sweden in 1994, Mankell's terrific fourth Kurt Wallender mystery opens with the kind of startling image typical of this internationally bestselling series (Firewall, etc.): a lawyer, driving home through the fog, stops after he sees "a human-sized effigy" propped on a chair in the middle of a deserted highway. Gustaf Torstensson gets out of the car to investigate, is hit from behind and was "dead before his body hit the damp asphalt." The police accept the assailant's claim that it was an accident, but when Torstensson's son, Sten, is shot dead just two weeks later, the brooding Wallender, who's on sick leave and vowing to retire from the Ystad police force, decides to pursue the killer and resume his career. The chief suspect—a powerful, globe-trotting Swedish businessman who's the smiling man of the title—leads Wallender on an exquisitely plotted search for motive and evidence. Dark and moody, this is crime fiction of the highest order. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistSwedish crime writer Mankell has taken U.S. publishing by storm over the last decade, launching a genre-altering invasion of his fellow Scandinavian mystery authors and (with other Europeans such as John Harvey and Andrea Camilleri) reinterpreting the notion of the hard-boiled hero. No longer the strong, silent, stand-up guy of American fiction, the new European hero, led by Mankell's Kurt Wallander, faces the horrors of the modern world with a sagging spirit, nearly overwhelmed. Lately, though, Mankell has rested Wallander, focusing instead on other cops in and around Ystad, Sweden, including Wallander's daughter, Linda, the star of Before the Frost (2005). Now the series returns to Wallander but backtracks in time. The Man Who Smiled, written in 1994, was the fourth in the series but is only now appearing in the U.S. It finds Wallander on the verge of quitting the Ystad police force; then a friend who had asked for his help is killed, and the would-be retiree is compelled to go back to work. The case that unfolds, involving a the head of a multinational corporation who traffics in the selling of human organs, opens yet another window on the unimaginable horrors of modern life, but this time Wallander responds with new resolve. Devotees of the series will be thrilled to pick up this missing chapter in the ongoing saga, but it is a bit disconcerting to keep the chronology straight. Still, any new Wallander novel--in whatever order--constitutes a major event in crime fiction. Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

After nearly thirty years in the same job, Inspector Kurt Wallander is tired, restless, and itching to make a change. He is taken with a certain old farmhouse, perfectly situated in a quiet countryside with a charming, overgrown garden. There he finds the skeletal hand of a corpse in a shallow grave. Wallander’s investigation takes him deep into the history of the house and the land, until finally the shocking truth about a long-buried secret is brought to light.INCLUDES AN AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR ReviewPraise for the Kurt Wallander series: • "No crime writer balances genre conventions with personal concerns as well as Mankell." The Boston Globe • "Mankell is that unusual thing: a European thriller writer whose work holds up as literature." The New York Times • "The Wallander series [is] essential reading for all crime-fiction fans." Booklist • "Mankell's lugubrious Swedish detective, Inspector Kurt Wallander, is one of the most impressive creations in crime fiction today.... Like a Baltic Inspector Morse, [Wallander] cogitates gloomily on the increase in cases of child abuse, drug smuggling and racial violence.... An old-fashioned moral force and sense of disquiet of the sort rarely found in contemporary crime fiction." The GuardianAbout the AuthorHENNING MANKELL's novels have been translated into 40 languages and have sold more than 40 million copies worldwide. He is the first winner of the Ripper Award (the new European prize for crime fiction) and has also received the Glass Key and Golden Dagger awards. His Kurt Wallander mysteries were adapted into a PBS television series starring Kenneth Branagh. Mankell divides his time between Sweden and Mozambique.

The moving story of an African boy taken to Sweden in the 1870s and haunted by the memories of his desert home, from the Swedish writer who is a worldwide phenomenon and whose books have been translated into 40 languages with more than 35 million copies...

Like his countrymen Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Mankell writes mysteries that connect crimes in Sweden to the rest of the world. Faceless Killers (1997), the first of his books about provincial police inspector Kurt Wallender to appear here, involved Turkish immigrants and Eastern European villains. This novel, written in 1993, links the murder of a real estate agent in Wallender's town of Ystad to South Africa, where Nelson Mandela has just been released from prison, and to Russia, where the KGB is busy planning Mandela's fate. Wallender is a classically dour but dedicated policeman whose progress through his cases is a combination of hard slogging and lucky breaks. But several factors render this effort less compelling than its predecessor. The first is the Day of the Jackal syndrome: we know that Mandela wasn't killed by KGB agents or white Afrikaner terrorists, and that knowledge makes the suspense writer's job even harder. Second is the book's length?560 pages is a long haul,...

A stunning and poignant autobiographical look at the myriad experiences that shape a meaningful life, by the bestselling author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries. In January 2014, Henning Mankell received a diagnosis of lung cancer. Quicksand is a response to this shattering news—but it is not a memoir of destruction. Instead, it is a testament to a life fully lived, a tribute to the extraordinary but fleeting human journey that delivers both boundless opportunity and crucial responsibility. In a series of intimate vignettes, Mankell ranges over rich and varied reflections: of growing up in a small Swedish town, where he experiences a startling revelation on a winter morning as a young boy; of living hand-to-mouth during a summer in Paris as an ambitious young writer; of his work at a theater in Mozambique, where Lysistrata is staged in the midst of civil war; of chance encounters with men and women who changed his understanding of the world....

The Eye of the Leopard is a first-rate psychological thriller, delving deep into the mind of a man lost in an unknown world, and is Mankell's finest non-crime novel yet.Hans Olofson is the son of a Swedish lumberjack. His childhood was unsettled: an alcoholic father, and a mother disappeared, only alive in old photographs. His adolescence was no easier as he lost both his best friend and his lover tragically. Alone and adrift, as a young man his only desire is to fulfil his lover's dream and visit the grave of a legendary missionary who survived alone in the remote hills of Northern Zambia.On reaching Africa, Olofson is struck by its beauty and mystery. After fulfilling his initial quest, an opportunity of employment in the region tempts him to stay. Time passes quickly. Though dismayed by the attitude of the white population to their adopted country, which is compounded by their vulnerability to alcohol and malaria, he is interested enough to take up sole...

A tense and gripping psychological thriller: Mankell's best book yetOctober 1914: the destroyer Svea emerged from the Stockholm archipelago bearing south-south-east. On board was Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, a naval engineer charged with making depth soundings to find a navigable channel for the Swedish navy. As a child Tobiasson-Svartman was fascinated by measurement; nothing is as magical as exact knowledge. His instinct for his profession is reflected in the comfortable domesticity he enjoys with his wife - herself meticulous in every detail.Close to the waters where soundings are taken Tobiasson-Svartman alights on a barren skerry, presumed uninhabited, and is surprised to discover there a young woman, Sara Fredrika. Despite her almost feral appearance, something about her strikes him to the core. The mission is a success and the Svea returns to Gothenburg. Tobiasson-Svartman, however, remains haunted by this chance encounter; his equilibrium has been...