Review: The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell

Title: the Dogs of Riga (the second Kurt Wallander novel)

Author: Henning Mankell (translated by Laurie Thompson)

Publisher: Vintage [originally 1991, this edition 2001]

ISBN: 1-860-46959-0

Length: 326 pages

Genre: Police Procedural/Espionage thriller

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 4/5

One-liner: An intense throwback to thrillers like Gorky Park

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A lifeboat holding the bodies of two dead men washes up on the shore near Ystad, Sweden and Kurt Wallander’s team must investigate. They soon discover that the men were dead prior to being placed in the life raft and then that the men were from Latvia. A Major from the Latvian Police comes to Sweden to assist with the investigation but returns home after only a few days. A major event that could be connected then forces Wallander to go to Riga in Latvia where he is like a fish out of water in a murky political world.

I only read my first Henning Mankell book, Faceless Killers, last year (yes, yes I know I am late to the party). While it was a good read it wasn’t a great one and frankly I found Wallander to be a bit of a boring stereotype so I didn’t rush to pick up the next book in the series. However, having bought the first four books all at the same time because they were on special I embarked on The Dogs of Riga, albeit without a lot of enthusiasm. Luckily I found this story much more engrossing and stayed up way past my bedtime to finish it.

One of the things that struck me most about this particular book is what a good job Mankell does of putting readers in the shoes of Wallander the outsider when he travels to Latvia. The mix of curiosity, confusion and fear that Wallander displays seemed very natural to me. Although we often see these traits in amateur sleuths or accidental heroes we don’t often see ‘official’ investigators in situations where this kind of uncertainty would be believable but in this situation it’s entirely credible. The Latvia that Mankell depicts during a time of political upheaval is a world apart from Wallander’s native Sweden and his growing discomfort with the differences is palpable.

Despite all of that I still can’t warm to Wallander as a character. His hypochondria, bowel problems (ugh!) and ‘helpless male’ shtick just don’t grab me and nor does his habit of believing himself in love with various women at the drop of a hat. About the only thing I like about him is his habit of ‘consulting’ his recently deceased colleague and mentor Rydberg which I found quite touching. He is certainly a richly created character but not one I’d care to meet in real life. Far more than the first book in the series this was a book about Wallander alone so the rest of the characters were fairly two-dimensional although as I was so engrossed in the story I didn’t mind this as much as I normally would.

As I read the book I was reminded of Margot Kinberg’s recent blog post about the politics of murder as this book is all about politics which is probably why I enjoyed it so much. With the bulk of the book being set in one of the three Baltic states which were, when Wallander wrote it, yet to achieve their full independence from Russia the book is dripping with big picture politics and how various individuals coped with their highly charged environment. Some took advantage of the changing landscape while others fought to return to different points in the past and I was thoroughly intrigued by this depiction. In fact the book reminded me of the cold war thrillers I used to devour than a traditional police procedural.

I haven’t decided if I will read the rest of the books in this series or not as I suspect my real enjoyment of this one might be an aberration due to the subject matter and I don’t know if I can stand another encounter with Wallander’s teenager-like behaviour. Does the man ever grow up?

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Inspector-Wallander.org is a great site with all the information about various incarnations of Wallander that you could possibly want. As well as details about the various books (their publication dates, translation availability etc) there are FAQs, character details and information about the various films and DVDs that have featured Wallander.

 

Review: Frozen Tracks by Ake Edwardson

Title: Frozen Tracks

Author: Åke Edwardson (translated by Laurie Thompson)

Publisher: Vintage  Books [original edition 2001, this translation 2008]

ISBN: 9780099472070

Length: 538 pages

Setting: Sweden, Present day

Genre: Police Procedural

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 4/5

One-liner: An emotionally charged and unpredictable novel which I struggled to put down.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In the weeks before Christmas several police stations in Gothenburg receive phone calls from parents who think their children might have, temporarily, been kidnapped by ‘a mister’. However because the incidents are minor (the children are unhurt and parents aren’t even sure the children whether the children have imagined things) and not logged centrally no one realises there might be a pattern of crimes emerging. At the same time DCI Erik Winter and his team are investigating a series of apparently random but brutal bashings of young men in the city. Both sequences of events begin to gain momentum while the personal lives of the investigating team take a battering too.

I’ve not read the previous two books in this series that have been translated into English but I don’t think I am at much disadvantage. I was quickly engaged by the eclectic investigative team who are dogged, introspective and quite funny. There’s a mildly insulting banter that is depicted between the team that lightens an otherwise quite sombre book and I thoroughly enjoyed that aspect (and kudos to the translator for this in particular as I think humour must be the most difficult thing to get right). At different times though team members can be emotional with each other, such as when Winter is consoling his friend and colleague Bertil Ringmar, and this depiction of people being affected and conflicted by events in their personal and professional lives is very compelling. Edwardson does a good job too at showing the effects of crime on victims and their families and also the families of investigators although the same depth wasn’t really visible with the main suspect who I found to be a bit stereotypical.

The story is, for the most part, well constructed although I did find the ending a little more convoluted than it needed to be. However the parallel cases are developed nicely with a realistic sense of wrong turns and dead ends and any linkages between the two threads are plausible. There are some slow points in the pacing which could easily have been removed by tighter editing and I am, again, at a loss to explain why books are so much longer these days than their counterparts from 10 or 20 years ago.

Edwardson has an odd style of writing in which a good deal of the action is inferred rather than described explicitly and many of the facts of the story are revealed through conversations between the team members rather than pure narrative description. I can understand that this might be frustrating for some readers as it leaves quite a few things unknown but it gave me the feeling that I was eavesdropping on a current investigation rather than reading a report once the case had been closed and I liked the immediacy and unpredictability this offered.

Other stuff

It was this review by Maxine at Euro Crime that made me pick this book up from the specials table (because I never buy books I don’t need without prompting) and Fiona at Euro Crime also offers her take on the book.

 

Review: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest by Stieg Larsson

Title: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

Author: Stieg Larsson, translated (brilliantly) by Reg Keeland (it’s always brilliant when you forget it’s translated)

Publisher: Maclehose Press [2009]

ISBN: 9781906694173

Length: 599 pages

Setting: Sweden, present day

Genre: Journalistic/legal thriller

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 5/5

One-liner: Slow to start but gripping, complex and demanding to be thought about and pondered long after the reading is done .

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

As the book opens Lisbeth Salander, subject of a nation-wide manhunt on suspicion of three murders, has been shot several times, once in the head, and is on her way by helicopter to hospital. Alexander Zalachenko, her father and a former Russian agent being protected by members of the Swedish police, has been hit in the face with an axe by Lisbeth and is on his way to the same hospital. Over the coming days both have their injuries treated while the bureaucrats and police officers who have protected Zalachenko for many years re-group to decide what action to take to ensure their activities are not uncovered. At the same time investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his colleagues at Millennium magazine start to piece together the evidence that will demonstrate what crimes have been committed and by whom.

First, let me get the flaws out of the way.

As was the case with the first two books in this series Hornets’ Nest would have benefited from tighter editing: it isn’t really a 600 page story. Sometimes excruciating details are provided about an eclectic collection of subjects (I have learned more than I ever wanted to about the hierarchy of the Swedish Police for example) and then other threads are left almost bare (as if Larsson had forgotten them in his rush to the end). Also, as he did in the first book, Larsson periodically stepped out of the role of storyteller and became a journalist preparing an in-depth Sunday feature with several diatribes and some passages that belonged in a lecture rather than a thriller. This failure to follow the ’show don’t tell’ rule is the most hated of my personal pet peeves and can be the thing that makes me stop reading. But I have learned that the details and the lecturing are as much a part of Larsson’s work as Lisbeth and his other fabulous characters and I think, perhaps, they are the necessary flip side of the thing that makes him such a good yarn-spinner: his passion.

It’s clearer than ever in this book that Larsson aimed to do more than tell a thrilling story. Earlier this year another journalist turned fiction writer, Matt Rees, blogged that writing his fictional tales set in Palestine allowed him to be far more truthful about the realities there than he could ever have been in his journalism and I wonder if Larsson didn’t experience this same phenomenon. He demonstrates the myriad ways women are mistreated by men throughout the book and I suspect much of this is based on things he saw as a journalist. Although it is Lisbeth who, as an almost allegorical character, experiences the worst of treatments over many years by men who abuse their physical and political power there are many other stories intertwined here. For example Erika Berger is stalked by someone she barely knows and treated abysmally on top of it, women are trafficked and treated as though no more than goods by Zalachenko and his son and there’s even a reminder of the trauma caused to Harriet Vanger which, in a way, started the entire series off. But Larsson doesn’t just depict a black and white world where all the men are awful and all women victims. The book is brimming with positive female characters who can look after themselves as well as many men who go out of their way to right the wrongs they have seen done around them.

Lisbeth plays a less active role in this book than in any of the others which could have disappointed me but didn’t. She features as a motivating force for much of the action and starts to display glimpses of a slowly healing psyche after all the abuse she has suffered. In addition there are many other compelling characters to become intrigued by. Erika features in a startling minor thread and is more well-rounded in this novel and there are great new characters to meet such as Mikael’s sister Annika who becomes Lisbeth’s lawyer. Mikael himself is probably his most engaging in this book and certainly his most mature as he develops sensitive professional and personal relationships with the police who must investigate the Zalachenko affair. Even the bad guys are well-drawn and reading about how they were drawn into the conspiracy to protect Zalachenko and in so doing cause deep harm to Lisbeth and others is quite fascinating.

Although all three novels have featured the Millennium magazine it was in this book that I was really struck by Larsson’s at times old-fashioned depiction of the role investigative journalism and plays in our world. I suppose being a journalist himself he was biased but it really does hit home how much we need a functional fourth estate and what trouble us little folk might be in if they disappear as would seem likely given the dire predictions for mainstream media.

In the end The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest is a complex, unpredictable book that wears its liberal heart proudly on its sleeve. I don’t imagine you could make much sense of it without having read the first two in the series and I would strongly recommend that if you’re going to read them at all (and you really, really should) then you must, as with all the very best stories, start at the beginning.

Other Stuff

I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo before I started this blog but you can read what I thought about The Girl Who Played With Fire

Hornets’ Nest has been reviewed all over the place including at two of my must read blogs: DJ’s Krimiblog and Euro Crime

And if you haven’t had quite enough try Understanding Swedish society through Stieg Larsson’s popular fiction. Is Stieg Larsson the 21^st Century Charles Dickens?

 

Review: The Ice Princess by Camilla Lackberg

Title: The Ice Princess

Author: Camilla Läckberg (translated from the Swedish by Steven T Murray)

Publisher: Harper Collins [original edition 2008, this edition 2009]

ISBN: 978-0-00-725392-0

Length: 393 Pages

30-something author Erica Falck has returned to her small hometown in Sweden to take care of her parents’ house and possessions after their tragic deaths. While there, the body of her childhood friend Alex is discovered in the bathtub. Police treat the death as a suicide but Alex’s parents do not believe their daughter killed herself and they beg Erica to write a glowing article about her. As Erica interviews various people important in Alex’s life she starts to uncover some of her secrets and when it’s confirmed that Alex couldn’t have killed herself the police also start investigating. Patrik Hedström, another childhood friend of Erica’s, is the lead investigator and he and Erica soon join forces and start a personal relationship too.

I’m going to start my review talking about the translation which is a feature I often overlook unless it’s not done well. This is terribly rude of me because I am sure it is a very difficult thing to get right. I imagine it’s even more difficult to capture the subtleties of both languages well enough to translate humour which Murray has done to perfection here. Not only is there an over-the-top laughable character, in the form of Superintendent Mellberg, but there’s a lovely gentle humour in Erica’s internal dialogue as well as in some of her conversations with Patrik and I think it’s a sign of excellence in translating that I kept forgetting the story wasn’t originally told in English.

And it’s a really good story. There are so many layers to it that I soon gave up thinking I’d worked something out because whenever I did a new discovery would be made that took the story in another unpredictable direction. Somehow all these twists and turns managed to feel completely natural though, as I never felt that sense of being manipulated that some twist-y books give. The resolution was at least partially unexpected and quite satisfying in the way it wrapped things up. I particularly liked the way the novel was bookended by two vignettes about a man who barely featured in the rest of the story. I could have done with a little less of the teenage-like romance between Erica and Patrik but it was quite nice to see at least one relatively normal relationship depicted among the couples of the town.

Both Erica and Patrik are well developed and quite credible characters although Erica does do a couple of things which could have screwed up the investigation and I thought Patrik was a little too accepting of her meddling. Some of the other minor characters are quite brilliantly drawn and I found myself developing a real picture of this small group of people who’d been connected in one way or another for 25 years.

It’s virtually impossible to categories this book neatly into any of the crime fiction sub-genres as it contains elements of a police procedural, psychological thriller and even a hint of the amateur sleuth ‘cosy’. Whatever label you give it though ultimately it did what all good books should do: kept me engaged from beginning to end. If you like a book that focuses on people and what makes them tick (and kill) and doesn’t have a lot of blood and gore then I heartily recommend this one.

My rating 4/5

Other stuff

Reviewed by Norm at Crime Scraps (who along with his excellent review also makes some pertinent points about book blurbs and their often total lack of connection to the book they are blurbing about), Karen at Euro Crime and Glenn at International Noir Fiction.

Läckberg’s second book translated to English, The Preacher, was released this year (and will be making it to my TBR pile just as soon as I can afford another virtual trip to Book Depository).

 

Review: Missing, Karen Alvtegen

Title: Missing

Author: Karin Alvtegen

Publisher: Penguin Canada [this edition 2006]

ISBN: 978-0-14-305382-8

Length: 352 pages

Sibylla Forsenström is 32 years old and has been homeless since she was 18. One of the tricks she uses when she wants a night’s sleep in a proper bed is to trick a businessman into paying for a hotel room for her. One night when she does this the man who paid for her room is murdered and the Police want to question Sibylla. When another body is found and the murder is also attributed to her she becomes a wanted woman all across Sweden and her usual haunts for keeping safe become unsuitable. Eventually she finds an unlikely friend and confidant who helps her to try and uncover who the real murderer might be.

I intended to read a few pages of this before going to sleep last night. I quite literally could not put it down and finished the whole thing in one sitting (thankfully it was a Friday night and I don’t work on Saturdays). Here is story telling at its absolute finest: I was hooked from page one of this simple and moving tale. It takes place over a short period of time which combined with the nature of the story and the fact that Sybilla features in all of the action depicted it has a very intense feel to it and I see from other reviews that I’m not the only one who read it in one sitting.

One of the things that struck me was that, unlike so many books these days, it didn’t delve deeply into every minute detail of Sybilla’s life and in fact left quite a few things up to the reader’s imagination. This is such a contrast from some of the detail-laden books the size of house bricks that I’ve read lately that I had almost forgotten that great stories can be told in less than 600 pages and that blood and gore aren’t necessary to create atmosphere.

Sibylla is a great character. She reminded me a little of Lisbeth in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy although given the vagaries of translation schedules I can’t work out which one would have been created first. The whole book is told from her point of view but alternates between present day events and the details of her childhood which explain how a girl born in a well to do family ends up homeless. It’s a rare character that can carry an entire book but Sibylla is interesting enough to do it and I was completely enthralled by both her present day troubles and the vignettes from her childhood. There aren’t really any other major characters but a couple of the minor players, including Sibylla’s hideous mother and the friend that helps her are both well drawn and quite memorable in their own right.

Missing is wonderfully sparse, genuinely exciting (I don’t stay up into the wee hours for just any old yarn) and quite thought provoking at the same time in the way it dealt with the issue of life’s outsiders.

My rating 5/5

Other stuff

Two recent reviews of this book prompted me to rescue my copy from my teetering TBR pile: Maxine at Euro Crime and Martin at Do You Write Under Your Own Name and the book has also been reviewed at Reading Matters.

 

Review: Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin

Title: Echoes from the Dead

Author: Johan Theorin

Publisher: Delta Trade Paperbacks [2008]

ISBN: 978-0-385-34221-6

In the early 1970’s a young boy named Jens disappeared on a remote island in Sweden. Twenty years later his mother, Julia, and his grandfather, Gerlof, attempt to unravel the events surrounding the disappearance. 

For want of a better word the book is literary in style, reminding me of David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars in the way it depicts very personal events that take place in a wider historical context. It has the same haunting sense of location too. When done badly the kind of descriptive writing Theorin has produced is dull but when done well, as is the case here, it is as gripping as any action-based thriller. I was thoroughly captivated from the moment five year-old Jens climbed the garden wall and headed into the fog. 

The structure of the novel is engaging too. The chapters are short and told from several different perspectives. Some are from Julia or Gerloff’s point of view and some take place in the past of Nils Kant, the man who it seems was responsible for Jens’ disappearance. This kind of leap-frogging between times and people can go badly awry but, again, Theorin has demonstrated superior writing skills in achieving a very understandable plot that is beautifully layered. But don’t be fooled: there’s plenty of real drama here too.

As good as all of those elements are, the characters in this book are even better. They’re complex and credible and I have such strong images of them all in my head that it’s like a movie playing.  There’s nothing stereotypical about any of them and they continued to surprise me right to the very end. Julia, the middle aged nurse who struggled to deal with her son’s disappearance isn’t nearly as two-dimensional as the blurb makes her sound and Gerlof, her octogenarian father is an unlikely but wholly wonderful hero. The island of Oland too is a character in its way and is just as memorable and just as deftly depicted as the people.

As is often the way with the best crime fiction the book is about much more than solving the mystery. It’s about family and yearning and grief and people finding out that they’re tougher than they think. All of which combined to make it one of those rarest of reading experiences that makes me give thanks to the universe that there are people who write. I feel honoured to have discovered Echoes from the Dead.

My rating 5/5

Other stuff

Reviewed at It’s A Crime in August 2008

Reviewed by Norman on Euro Crime in August 2008

 

 

Review: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

Title: The Girl Who Played With Fire

Author: Stieg Larsson

Publisher: Maclehose Press [2009]

ISBN: 978-1-84724-557-1

The Girl Who Played With Fire starts about a year after the events in the first book in the series. Lisbeth Salandar has cut off all contact from Mikael Blomkvist for reasons he cannot fathom. While she travels the world Mikael faithfully but fruitlessly visits her apartment regularly and, at the same time, becomes something of a celebrity as everyone wants to interview him about the explosive events known as the Wennerstrom affair. As Mikael becomes somewhat jaded by the attention he’s asked to consider a proposition from a young journalist: publish a well-researched book about the awful trade in the trafficking of teenage girls into the country. The journalist is prepared to name names of powerful people in Sweden but before the book can be published events take a dramatic turn.

Larsson is a first rate story teller. He spins a page-turning, edge-of-your-seat yarn and has, if anything improved since The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (his first book in this series which was no slouch in the great story stakes). In this outing there are still multiple threads but he seems to have a better handle on them all and he connects them better than in the first book. There are, again, stories within a story, but they’re satisfyingly resolved and don’t detract from the overall novel even when they have little to do with the main events (such as Lisbeth’s adventure on the night a tornado levels a tropical island at the beginning of the book). The best thing of all is that he doesn’t take the predictable course of action and for that I, as a reader, am eternally grateful. 

However, no matter how good the stories, I’ll always remember this series for the characters. Lisbeth Salandar again features as the troubled young woman with disconcerting, sometimes downright abnormal, social skills. She’s also intelligent, determined and highly moral. She’s quite unforgettable. But the other characters too are well depicted. It doesn’t matter if they’ve a bit part to play or a starring role, whether they’re bad guys or good they are believable and complex and rounded rather than the caricatures that appear in a lot of fiction.

Importantly, for me anyway, Larsson has a much better control of his social conscience in this book. My only big criticism of the first book was that he stepped outside the narrative more than once to lecture readers about his undoubtedly important message. Here though that message is in some ways stronger it is far more delicately incorporated into the story and, consequently, packs a more powerful punch. I have no objection to an author with a message, especially not one as close to home as the ongoing mistreatment of women across the world is to me, but I hate being badly preached at in my fiction.

I’m glad I read the book with as little expectation as I could achieve by not reading reviews or any of the chat that’s been clogging up the corner of the internet where I hang out. I started the book with a tingly anticipation of re-visiting characters I’d enjoyed but no more than that and was able to dive right into the book and appreciate it on whatever merits I could find. For the record I don’t think it’s perfect. The first 100-150 pages could easily have been more tightly edited for example. But I don’t care. I love it despite, or perhaps because of, its flaws. As I raced towards the end I started experiencing that internal conundrum where you want to keep reading because you have to know what happens but you don’t want to finish because you don’t want to say goodbye. I am quite inconsolable that I have to wait 12 months for book three in the series.

My rating 5/5 (second one for the year and it’s only January)

More information

The Girl Who Played With Fire Official Website

A review of the book on Euro Crime

A review of the book at Readings

A review by The Australian newspaper