Kurt Wallander

In a remote Swedish farmhouse, an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death and his wife left to die. As if this didn't present enough problems for Police Inspector Kurt Wallander, the dying woman's last word is foreign. This one tangible clue could also inflame Sweden's already smoldering anti-immigrant sentiments.

On the Swedish coastline, two bodies, victims of grisly torture and cold execution, are discovered in a life raft. With no witnesses, no motives, 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 the routine once more, until he is called suddenly to Riga and plunged into an alien world in which shadows are everywhere, everything is watched, and old regimes will do anything to stay alive.

The execution-style murder of a Swedish housewife looks to Wallander like a simple crime of passion. But as he digs deeper, he uncovers an assassination plot and soon finds himself in a tangle with the secret police and with a ruthless foreign agent.

After killing a man in the line of duty, a disillusioned Inspector Kurt Wallander has quit the police force. When an old acquaintance turns up dead, Wallander, against his better judgment, returns to work, and with the help of a rookie female detective, investigates what may now have become a double murder case.

A string of gruesome murders show the obvious markings of a demented serial killer, and Sweden's Detective Wallander is frantic to find him before he strikes again. Fascinating and astute, Sidetracked is a compelling mystery enhanced by keen social awareness.

In an African convent, four nuns and an unidentified fifth woman are brutally murdered. A year later in Sweden, Inspector Kurt Wallander is baffled by two strange and grotesque murders. His only clues are a skull, a diary, a photo, and an elusive connection to the unsolved murder of the fifth woman.

On Midsummer's Eve, three role-playing teens dressed in eighteenth-century garb are shot in a secluded Swedish meadow. When one of Inspector Kurt Wallander's most trusted colleagues, someone whose help he hoped to rely on to solve the crime, also turns up dead, Wallander knows the murders are related. But with his only clue a picture of a woman no one in Sweden seems to know, he can't begin to imagine how. Reeling from his father's death and facing his own deteriorating health, Wallander tracks the lethal progress of the killer. Locked in a desperate effort to catch him before he strikes again, Wallander always seems to be just one step behind.

A body is found at an ATM, the apparent victim a 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 complicated than he initially suspected. The two cases become one and lead to a conspiracy that stretches far beyond the borders of Sweden.

This collection of five stories traces the growth of Swedish Inspector Kurt Wallander into a first-rate detective, from rookie cop to young father to middle-aged divorcé, illuminating how Wallander became a first-rate detective and highlighting new facets of a now-canonical character. In “Wallander's First Case,” the twenty-one-year-old patrolman's first homicide case involves his next-door neighbor, seemingly dead by his own hand. Wallander is a young father confronting an unexpected threat on Christmas Eve in “The Man with the Mask.” In “The Man on the Beach,” he is on the brink of middle age and troubled by a distant wife as he unravels why a lonely man was poisoned. Newly separated in “The Death of the Photographer,” he investigates the murder of the local photographer and discovers some well concealed secrets. In “The Pyramid” he is the veteran detective uncovering connections between a downed plane and the assassination of two elderly sisters. Written from the unique perspective of an author looking back upon his own creation to discover his origins, these mysteries are vintage Mankell and essential reading for all Wallander fans. The Pyramid is a wonderful display of Mankell's virtuosic powers as an acknowledged master of the police procedural.