The Fifth Woman

The Wallander books are a great diversion. I was reading this as I worked on a couple other books, but I found myself turning to “The Fifth Woman” more often than the others, eager to follow the mystery of the deaths of several seemingly unconnected victims. Wallander is a great character. As you follow him through one of his cases, you feel increasingly exhausted, just as he does. This is because he pours all his time and energy into his work. In “The Fifth Woman,” there are a lot of midnight staff meetings, a lot of late-night interrogations of people connected to the crimes. Nothing can wait until the next morning. As a result, Kurt Wallander doesn’t eat well, doesn’t sleep much, and runs himself into the ground. The book begins with Kurt taking a much-needed vacation with his father to Rome. Anyone who’s read this series knows his relationship with his father is fraught, but the trip draws them closer. Unfortunately–SPOILER ALERT–Kurt’s father dies soon afterward, so this death haunts him for the rest of the book. Wallander seems to realize that his personal relationships–with his girlfriend, Baiba, in Latvia, and his daughter, Linda–take a backseat to his work, yet he can’t seem to do anything about it. In “The Fifth Woman,” he wants a dog and a house but can’t make the time to see this through, and he worries about money. His car breaks down, and he cringes at the expenses. As for this particular case, various men are killed in various ways but Wallander concludes these murders are the work of a single serial killer. There’s a link to events that take place in Africa, as in previous Wallander books. All the police feel that Sweden is changing for the worse and becoming more violent. The Wallander investigations seem “real,” by which I mean that clues sometimes lead nowhere or are red herrings, and sometimes time passes with a frustrating lack of clues. But this verisimilitude also leads to lulls in the writing. I could feel “The Fifth Woman” dragging. Even the sentences came to seem flat, short, declarative, as though Mankell was simply trying to hit a page count. When I read a mystery, I don’t necessarily want reality; I want a page-turner. Here there’s as much dedication to Wallander as there is to the crimes he investigates, which I like. Wallander tracks down the killer at a train platform, only to have the killer escape. I found the recapture a bit too easy, based on a Wallander hunch with little to support it. My only other minor gripe about this novel was its subplot of a citizen’s defense league that was forming and seemed like a real, nationwide threat. This vigilante group was too quickly and easily disbanded, and the subplot simply vanished. This needed a firmer resolution.

This is the first book by this author that I have read and I am not impressed. In fact I was bored and had to force myself to finish this book. Maybe it lost something in the translation from whatever language they use in Sweden. The idea of the plot was much better than the actual plot and story line. The characters are flat. Wallander, the detective wondered much more than anything else and he was astonished at sandwich prices at places he always goes to eat. He can’t figure out how he is going to buy a new car after paying exorbitant repairs, but he is excited to buy a new house that he can afford and get a puppy. His father dies and he doesn’t have time to grieve. He doesn’t have time for his daughter and girlfriend, and he wonders time and time again where the investigation is leading. Oh, and it can’t be a woman who is killing because “the car roared off”. What does that mean? There are other remarks like this in the book, sexist much? The lead detective, Wallander repeats himself endlessly like others, including the reader, don’t understand anything. He also misses important things in the investigation and he “wonders what he missed”. There are also notes that other detectives give Wallander that are unimportant to him until they become important later in the investigation. The author makes these detectives sound completely inept. How did they manage to solve anything? The story actually leapt near the end to find the killer. I’m still not sure how they got there! It rains again and and again and it is windy. Why must the author belabor the weather? It made for extraneous words and had no bearing on the plot. It’s not like it was actually connected to possibly erasing evidence, but could have been..There are ideas in the book that are much more interesting and would be a wonderful plot idea. A shrunken head and diary found in a safe of the first murder victim, but oh, NO, nothing to do with the murder! A woman who disappeared 30 years ago without a trace. Four Nuns killed in Africa. Again, not part of the plot. *****Spoiler Alert!!! The fifth woman was killed with the Nuns, but it was covered up! Never explained! Again! another good plot. In the end, I am nothing, but disappointed. I try to read books by new authors to me, but I won’t try this one again.

In this novel, Mr. Mankell continues his Swedish police procedural series featuring Police Inspector Kurt Wallander, located in the town of Ystad in southern Sweden.

After an introduction to the murderer and a glimpse of some of the motivation behind her crimes, the novel proceeds to the scene of the first murder within the Ystad jurisdiction. A retired car dealer, a bird lover and self-published poet, walks to his bird watching tower and crosses a plank bridge. When a plank gives way, he falls and finds himself impaled on a set of bamboo spikes mounted on the mud beneath the bridge. there the dies an agonizing slow death.

Wallander arrives on the scene and after a second visit discovers the grisly scene. His crew begins thier investigation in earnest.

The author skillfully intersperses scenes of the investigative effort and the murder as she prepares her second victim and then later her third.

As always, Mr. Menkell has successfully demonstrated the investigative process Kurt Wallander and his crew uses to follow clues and Kurt’s worry that they are taking turns in the investigation which will lead them away form the predator rather than toward him/her.

He establishes a good pace between action and plodding detective work.

Highly recommended/

Several books after “Dogs of Riga” comes “The Fifth Woman”. In this police procedural people wear a lot of hats: men mask misogynism, brutality toward women–and they turn up impaled on stakes or tied to a tree and strangled. Kurt Wallander grumbles about “Sweden is becoming a quagmire”. This book is almost a prequel to Lisbeth Salander in Steig Larsson’s “The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo”. It is nothing short of exhilarating. Henning Mankell holds up a mirror to 1996 Sweden.

A good story that isn’t in a rush. The background to a series of brutal murders is set up and the story unspools at its own pace. Mankell takes time for multiple meanderings off the main path of the tale, most notably exploring the character and background of Wallander himself and his fraught paternal relationship. We also see good character development of even the secondary characters, including a number of Wallander’s police colleagues. All this is set against the lowering backdrop of the flat, grey, muddy, rainy, misty, cold landscape of Skane in southern Sweden. It’s quite tragic in places. They don’t call it Scandinavian Noir for nothing.

The slow revelations and frequent digressions add much to the feeling of atmosphere and immersiveness of the novel, but this comes at a price. I am patient with books but I did find myself at times wishing that the thing would just hurry up a bit. There are only so many times that I want to see Wallander and his investigators conclude that they are no further forward and without a clue. Honestly, 580 pages could have been 450 without very much loss. The ending is satisfactory, but is as slow and drawn-out as the rest of the book.

An atmospheric, immersive novel that takes a bit of patience. Recommended nevertheless.