The White Lioness

Henning Mankell is a master of using the bleak landscape of Ystad, Sweden, to illuminate the temperament of his depressed and cautious detective, Kurt Wallander. Here Wallander is confronted with the murder, execution style and with no apparent motive, of a young realtor and pillar of the Methodist church. Wallander soon finds himself in a confusing tangle involving a ruthless ex-KGB agent and racist South Africans determined to prolong Afrikaner rule. Dick Hill translates Mankell's minimalist narrative style without flashiness and generates tension at the same time, an impressive feat. Hill seamlessly switches viewpoints and accents among Swedish, Russian, and South African characters with absolute believability, despite the clunky plot. A.B. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

June 8, 1998
Like his countrymen Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Mankell writes mysteries that connect crimes in Sweden to the rest of the world. Faceless Killers (1997), the first of his books about provincial police inspector Kurt Wallender to appear here, involved Turkish immigrants and Eastern European villains. This novel, written in 1993, links the murder of a real estate agent in Wallender's town of Ystad to South Africa, where Nelson Mandela has just been released from prison, and to Russia, where the KGB is busy planning Mandela's fate. Wallender is a classically dour but dedicated policeman whose progress through his cases is a combination of hard slogging and lucky breaks. But several factors render this effort less compelling than its predecessor. The first is the Day of the Jackal syndrome: we know that Mandela wasn't killed by KGB agents or white Afrikaner terrorists, and that knowledge makes the suspense writer's job even harder. Second is the book's length--560 pages is a long haul, even with three exotic settings and dozens of important characters. Third might be Thompson's translation, which--unlike Steven T. Murray's work on Faceless Killers--often seems excessively deadpan. But Wallender is still a solid character, whose strengths and weaknesses are utterly credible, and Mankell (who now lives in Mozambique) knows how to make the most of his virtues.