Wallender must find the targets of a vengeful woman before she does

This was my first foray into the world of Swedish detective Kurt Wallender, and while the main character shares the same alienated, depressed profile of so many of his counterparts in the Scandinavian police procedural literary genre, there is something else to Mankell’s protagonist that makes for a different and interesting reading experience. Wallender’s angst as he goes about his duties does not stem from some personality or mental disorder, but rather from the social and cultural decline he feels is swirling around him, day in and day out, making his job a true labor of Sisyphus.
Several corpses turn up showing signs of a prolonged and awful death meted out by a serial killer, and while Wallender suspects a connection among the victims, he can find no evidence that there is one. It is not until more deaths and a rather large intuitive leap on his part pointing to the killer as a woman out for revenge, that things slowly begin to fall into place. From the very beginning, we know who the villain is and throughout the book, I couldn’t quite decide whose side I was on. I suspect Wallender has the same problem.
Our hero detective lives in the small Swedish town of Ystad, and the town is still reeling from the horrific serial killings of the previous summer which Wallender was instrumental in solving. Now slammed by these new and fiendishly plotted murders, the town—indeed the entire country—is not only blaming the police for failure to keep the peace, but vigilante groups are mass organizing and Wallender fears his country will further devolve into violence and chaos. Wallender begins to question whether Sweden’s renown as a peaceful and democratic society is in fact a thin veneer on a decayed and dying culture.
Of course, there are the usual background personal crises we have to expect from Scandinavian police thrillers—dying father with whom Wallender has an unresolved relationship; a daughter who needs protecting; an ex-wife who is moving on while Wallender is not; and so on. But his experience, his honed intuition, his smarts, and his persistence always pay off, and in the end, Wallender always gets his man…or woman, as the case may be.
The writing is deceptively simple and effective, the psychological insights of the author are powerful, and the alternating chapters that take the reader into the minds of both Wallender and the perpetrator work well with this genre. I can’t say the book was brilliant, but sufficiently different from so many of the others out there that it proved eerily refreshing. I went to Netflix and found the BBC’s Wallender series, with the lead played by Kenneth Brannaugh, and I must say the film versions are, so far, a total hit with me.