Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
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.
Henning Mankell (1948–2015) was an internationally bestselling author who received numerous awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association’s Macallan Gold Dagger and the German Tolerance Prize. His Kurt Wallander mysteries are global bestsellers and have been adapted into the PBS Masterpiece Mystery! series Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh. The New Press has published English translations of nine of his Kurt Wallander mysteries—Faceless Killers, The Dogs of Riga, The White Lioness, Sidetracked, The Fifth Woman, One Step Behind, Firewall, The Man Who Smiled, and The Pyramid—and Before the Frost: A Linda Wallander Mystery; the novels The Return of the Dancing Master, Chronicler of the Winds, Depths, Kennedy’s Brain, The Eye of the Leopard, Italian Shoes, Daniel, and The Shadow Girls; and the nonfiction I Die, But My Memory Lives On: The World AIDS Crisis and the Memory Book Project. Born in Stockholm, Mankell grew up in the Swedish village of Sveg. He divided his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he was a director at Teatro Avenida.