excellent, but if you are new to Wallander Mysteries, read them in sequence...

books:


	• The Man Who Smiled (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) Henning Mankell Vintage, 2007 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 31 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Excellent series in a non-English-speaking setting

Sweden used to be a pretty safe country. People didn't plant bombs in your car or mines in your back garden. By the early 1990s, however, as Inspector Kurt Wallender notes, "Crime became more frequent and more serious: Different, nastier, more complicated. And we started finding criminals among people who'd previously been irreproachable citizens." And the Swedish police haven't dealt with the change very successfully, not even in Ystad, the town at the very bottom of Sweden where Wallender is the star of the local police force -- until the previous year when he was forced to kill a man. Wallender is a very human, very believable cop. He worries about screwing up, he gets frightened when he discovers he's being followed, he sometimes drinks too much (and then feels guilty about it). But he has no patience with incompetence or back-biting among his colleagues. (You *really* don't want to rub him the wrong way, and with good reason.) He's also willing to bend the rules if necessary in his attempts to suppress true evil. And the Bad Guy in this one really is evil! Mankell supplies a lot of detail about Swedish police methods and the restrictions of bureaucracy in a semi-welfare state (though that status is changing), which is interesting if you're only familiar with American and British procedurals, and the translation is very competent. This is the fourth in the Kurt Wallender series (not the author's only series, either), so I'm going to have to go back and find the first three.

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excellent, but if you are new to Wallander Mysteries, read them in sequence...

Other reviewers said all that had to be said. I have one suggestion to readers that are new to Kurt Wallander Mystery Novels. Read them in sequence. Unfortunately, they were translated to English out of order. Here is the correct order: 1. Faceless Killers (1991) 2. The Dogs of Riga (1992) 3. The White Lioness (1993) 4. The Man Who Smiled (1994) 5. Sidetracked (1995) 6. The Fifth Woman (1996) 7. One Step Behind (1997) 8. Firewall (1998) and 9. Before the Frost (2002). Also, consider another 'non-Wallander' mystery: The Return of the Dancing Master (2000) I hope I didn't miss anything...

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out of sequence but great

The book starts off slow and murky, especially if you haven't already figured out that this is an early Wallander just now translated into English (I hadn't). However, the pace picks up after a few chapters, and after I loan the volume out to several family members, I'll be stowing it on my bookshelves for future re-reading enjoyment. Vintage Mankell.

No mystery at all

The author reveals the murderer in the first chapter. I suppose the reader is supposed to read the book with the murderer's viewpoint in mind: i.e., "I did it & the cops are too stupid to figure it out." I just felt frustrated that the cops couldn't see it. Good discriptions of Denmark & Norway though.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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