The White Lioness

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.

August 1, 1998
Mankell's "Faceless Killers", the Swedish author's first novel to appear in English, introduced Kurt Wallander, an Old World cop on the edge of being overwhelmed by New World crime. Wallander returns in this less compelling but still memorable case involving an assassination attempt on Nelson Mandela in 1990. The disappearance of a Swedish housewife--murdered by an ex-KGB agent training the would-be assassin, hired by right-wing Afrikaaners--draws Wallander into the tangle of South African politics. The action jumps from Sweden to South Africa, where President de Klerk struggles to bring his country into an apartheid-free new era. The massive scope of the novel--race relations in South Africa, on one hand, Wallander's personal travails in distant Sweden, on the other--proves a bit unwieldy, but the action is skillfully grounded in human rather than political concerns: the ambiguous moral position of the black assassin, Wallander's single-minded determination to explain the housewife's death, the tortured psyche of the Afrikaaner leader. If Mankell's reach slightly exceeds his grasp here, his stature as a major voice in international crime fiction remains undisturbed. ((Reviewed August 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)