Police

The plot in this novel - slow to develop, with layer upon layer of complexity, benefits a great deal from Mankell's spare writing style - while he writes about a world in chaos, his controlled and unsentimental prose carries you along. This novel has parts in both South Africa and Sweden, and involves Russian ex-KGB agents in a plot to assassinate Nelson Mandela. How this ties in to the apparently senseless murder of a young Swedish mother and real estate agent is the journey of the novel, and Wallender's reason for pursuing the case to its end, convoluted as the path is. Wallender is enraged by the young mother's murder and also puzzled - he and his team feel there's more underlying the story, more they can't figure out. Only when a fire breaks out in the vicinity of her disappearance and the detectives discover not the woman's missing body but the finger of a black man, do they begin to head down the road to finding her killer.

This novel is exquisite on many, many levels, not least for its clear-eyed depiction of life in South Africa. The plot has many turning points where one little thing that should have gone right goes wrong, and it changes the course of events - and in key developments, actions taken by characters based on the ungovernable quality of human emotion rather than reason really changes the way things happen. This was the rare book where I got to the approximate middle and couldn't imagine where Mankell's story would take me next - it was nowhere I expected to go, but it was a fascinating journey. This is the book for you if you want a smart, well written and plotted read that takes you completely away from the world you live in to another one.