Sidetracked

Wallender has been an excellent tv series that was worthwhile following and based on Henning Mankell’s books. Kurt Wallander comes alive even more so in print, as do the Swedish police and Sweden as both a beautiful country in it’s brief summer but dark, dreary, yet somehow beautiful in the long winter. Wallander is a focused thoughtful detective who works well with his staff and in this book with nearby towns and cities police forces. He recognizes and appreciates excellent work while able to overlook difficult personalities who are superior performers in their area of expertise. Sidetracked by the perpetrator, standard procedure, cultural and heritage, past experiences in murder cases makes for reading lengthy confused thoughts and feelings of getting nowhere.
Henning Mankell created a series of books and we’ll developed characters to read, understand and appreciate for those who enjoy detective and mystery that are above average.

If you haven’t met police detective Kurt Wallander yet, read Mankell. Entertaining, realistic, nail-biting without being over the top. Mankell is a gifted writer; to the point he never seems to know what Wallander is going to do next. The very human Wallander has to deal with an aging father, an aimless daughter and a long-distance girl-friend (at middle age), but directs his crew brilliantly, solving homicides that don’t follow the rules. There are nearly a dozen Wallander novels, related mostly just by the characters. Read them, and anything else Mankell has written. Non-Wallander novels “Italian Shoes” and sequel “After the Fire” are classics!

In one of my Kurt Wallander books it has “Sidetracked” listed as the third in the series and in another it has it as fourth. In the description on Amazon it says it is the third so I’ll go with that for anyone wondering about the order. In the title above it says it’s number five, so who knows?

This is an amazing thriller and one of the best I’ve read of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series yet. It’s suspenseful, creepy and although whodunnit might be figured out, it’s the why that isn’t always easy.

The book starts out when Kurt Wallander is called to an old farmhouse by an elderly man who complains of a girl out in his rape fields just hanging around and as many times as he has asked her to leave, she won’t. When Wallander sees her he tries to approach the very young woman only to have her douse herself with gasoline and set herself on fire. Wallander and the farmer are horrified, and throughout the rest of the book Wallander is haunted by the scene of this woman burning to death. The question is who is she and why did she kill herself in such an awful way.

If that isn’t enough, the very next day Wallander gets a call and goes to the beach where the body of Sweden’s former Minister of Justice lies axed to death and scalped. When another ax murder and scalping takes place, the police know they have a dangerous serial killer on the loose. Wallander and the Ystad police will have their hands full in order to find out who is committing these crimes and also why the young woman killed herself.

This book is fast-paced and does have its moments of violence, but I’ve read much grislier in other books. I love what the author has done with the relationships with Wallander and his daughter, Linda, his father, and Linda and her grandfather. Although Kurt’s father remains a source of anxiety for him, the older man is somewhat of a comic relief with his paintings and his one-liners. The love that Wallander has for his daughter and also for his father, as irritating as he can be, is a very nice part of this book. The ending is worth the entire rest of the book. I really loved this one and couldn’t stop reading. I think I finished it in less than twenty-four hours.

This is an interesting Swedish mystery with Kurt Wallander leading a team of detectives attempting to solve two crimes. While the mood of the story is often gloomy rain, personal worries, fear that his (Wallanders) girlfriend is seeing another man, illnesses, old age, deaths, needing to give up planned vacations, lack of sleep, Wallanders new boss being unsure of himself this atmosphere does not detract from the story. It offers readers a more in-depth understanding of characters and the difficulties facing the police. It is true that when I watched the TV versions of several Wallander mysteries which were moody, I was somewhat turned off by the gloom, but I did not have this feeling reading this book or the several other Mankell Wallander mysteries that I read. In fact, I looked forward to reading this book and enjoyed it. It is well written and gripping.
One of the mysteries, the smaller one, the one that takes up less police and story time, is the apparent suicide of a young Jamaican girl who showed up in Sweden for unknown reasons, seemed to be afraid of something, went out to a strange field, apparently simply because it was there, poured gasoline in a circle around her and on her, and when Wallander began to approach her, she ignited herself and burned to death. Wallander and his team try to find out why she apparently wanted to commit suicide and why she did it the way she did, for there is just about no more hurtful way to die than to be burned to death. This is why Joan of Arc was burned and why witched were burned, to give them as much pain as possible.
The other mystery is what seem to be bizarre serial killings. We are told that the murderer identifies with Herbert Hoover of the American FBI and with the Indian Chief Geronimo, and that he paints his face when he goes out to kill. We are also told that he is seeking revenge for his sister. This is about all we know at the onset of the novel, but the police do not know this. What they do know is that the murders are carefully planned, an ax or hatchet is used, and the victims are scalped. They try to find a connection between the victims but do not find it and they try to delve into the psychology of the murderer but do not see it.

I first hear of the Wallander series of novels through watching the BBC adaptations. I began at the start and quickly arrived at Sidetracked, the fifth Wallander novel. Sidetracked happened to be one of the three books adapted for TV so when I began reading I was already familiar with what happens in the book. However, this did not spoil my enjoyment of the book.

Sidetracked goes back to the bread and butter of police procedurals, which is by no means a bad thing. Gone are the days of international mischief that have peppered previous novels. Wallander and his team of well-established characters are involved in two cases, which at first do not appear to be related and are committed in the vicinity of Skane – a series of murders involving scalping and the gruesome suicide of a young lady.

There is also a greater insight into Wallander’s personal life. His relationships with members of his family begin to warm and his love interest – Baipa – gets a greater mention in this book, which is welcome.

Overall, an excellent Wallander outing. It’s easy to see why this book is award-winning