The Dogs of Riga

This second novel in Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series is a bit slower than the first, but is full of twists and turns. It is a mult-layered mystery that takes place beginning in Ystad and ends in the Baltic country of Latvia and the city of Riga. The story starts when a life raft washes ashore near Ystad with two well-dressed dead men in it and they are eventually traced to Latvia. Wallander and his police department work on the case, but trying to identify these men and find out who killed them is nearly impossible.

A policeman from Riga named Liepa comes to Ystad to work with police and Wallander on the case. Major Liepa seems to be an honest man and serious about his work, although he chain smokes so much that it drives the others, including Wallander, crazy. There is no smoking allowed in the Ystad police station.

The story takes place after the fall of the Berlin wall and the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. Life in the Eastern Bloc is dreary and people aren’t free like they are in Sweden. The mood is as dreary as the weather but Wallander must find out who has killed the men in the life raft and also solve another difficult murder that happens in Riga. It is also interesting that he brings up the case that he solved in the previous book, “Faceless Killers” several times in “The Dogs of Riga.”

Wallander finds himself in Riga, Latvia after Major Liepa returns home, but he’s confused, followed and watched the whole time he’s there and isn’t even sure why he is there and what he’s supposed to be doing. It is winter and sleet, snow and extreme cold are what he is faced with in addition to Latvian police officers that he doesn’t trust. Par for the course for Wallander, he hardly ever gets enough sleep or food and winds up exhausted, but running from people who don’t want the best for you can make eating and sleeping very hard to do. He keeps in touch with his father who is as cantankerous as always. Wallander returns to Sweden only to go back to Riga under the guise of going skiing in the Alps. He must locate some crucial information before it is too late. This is a very action-packed part of the book.

A very enjoyable novel and I am soon on to the third in the Kurt Wallander series.

I’m a Henning Mankell fan and have had a long time desire to visit Sweden. Therefore I get some vicarious pleasure from these books, and they are short which can be refreshing. The Dogs of Riga is, by far, my favorite. One of the main characters has moved on (did he die? I don’t remember:-) anyway, long suffering Kurt Wallendar, is still around and so is his relationship with his father. The detective finally decides to do something about his health while trying to solve a mystery of how two tortured bodies, shot at close range, guessed to be from the Eastern Bloc could drift ashore in a life boat w/out any markings. I’m about halfway through it but am enjoying it immensely

Wallander is back and is faced with 2 dead bodies that wash up on the shore. This cases has twists and turns that send him behind the fallen Iron curtain to assist the local police.

This was a page turner.

How can he help?
Who can he help?
Will anyone help him?

An interesting view of a post USSR Latvia.

Having heard so much about Baiba in later Kurt Wallander books it’s good to get to know her, and she is, somewhat to my surprise, an innocent, fragile person, but by no means helpless. This story is loaded with action, violence and cliffhanging danger–with many scenes of genuinely threatening, potentially lethal peril to both Kurt and Baiba. “The Dogs of Riga” would make a fantastic film! I have a friend from Latvia, and will give her a copy for Christmas. Since she, too, tells horrific stories of the Stalinist legacy of ruling commissars, I expect the perils of the plot will strike some responsive chords. Politically both of us are left-liberals, definitely not right-wing anarchists and followers of violent talk show hosts. I’m a Socialist. I can’t imagine anyone except a rigid Fascist wanting to be ruled by a wealthy, power-crazed oligarchy, spied upon by the government, jailed without habeas corpus for revealing unconstitutional activities, and slandered for wanting justice and peace–which seems to be the way our own country has been going since at least 1981, and why both my friend and I are political, social and economic activists. And it’s why (although the NeoCons complained) the Soviet and other Soviet bloc reformers of the late 1980s and 90s–the period of this novel–were universally referred to as “liberals”.

The book was enjoyable and beautifully written, but here Henning strays from his usual Kurt Wallender tale to take in the political upheaval in Latvia. The story begins on familiar territory. Two bodies wash up on a beach in Skane. Wallender struggles to identify the dead men and where they came from. Well it’s Latvia. In due course Wallender travels to Riga to help solve yet another murder, a police inspector who had been sent to Sweden to help identify the initial two corpses. In Riga, the tale takes on a political scope. Because this story is not the usual Kurt Wallender mystery, although the familiar cast of characters are present, it can be a little off putting for Wallender fans. Yet the story paints a vivid portrait of life and culture in a world still controlled by the Soviet Union. This world is pretty much unknown to us in the west. But the glimpse of this collapsing Soviet hegemony makes the story well worth the read. And this is the novel that introduces the beautiful and enigmatic Baiba who becomes an important presence in subsequent novels.