Kennedy's Brain

July 23, 2007
In Mankell’s engaging but overly polemical stand-alone crime novel, Louise Cantor, an archeologist working in Greece, returns home to Sweden to discover her grown son, Henrik, lying dead in his own bed. Cantor, who refuses to accept the police theory that Henrik killed himself, launches her own investigation. (The book’s title refers to one of the mysteries surrounding the JFK assassination, which had become a bizarre metaphor for the secretive Henrik.) In her quest for answers, Cantor journeys to Australia in search of her estranged husband; to Barcelona, where Henrik had an apartment and a surprisingly large bank account; and to Maputo, Mozambique, where she learns of the devastation wrought by poverty, AIDS and greed. Mankell, author of the wonderful Kurt Wallender series (Faceless Killers
, etc.), is a deft and imaginative plotter and an insightful observer of the human condition, but here his righteous anger over the AIDS crisis in Africa and the exploitative role of the pharmaceutical industry overshadows the mystery solving.

September 1, 2007
Departing from his acclaimed police procedurals featuring Inspector Kurt Wallender, Mankell fashions a grim thriller around the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Swedish archaeologist Louise Cantor, overwhelmed by grief at finding her adult son and only child Henrik dead when she returns from a dig in Greece, rejects the police finding of suicide and sets out to prove that he was murdered. What she finds, with help from her ex-husband, is a life that Henrik hid from her involving travel, unexplained wealth, and a fascination with JFK's brain, missing after his autopsy. But not until she reaches Mozambique, where horrific means don't begin to justify seemingly altruistic ends, does she uncover the full story. Mankell's anger about the epidemic in Africa fueled this novel, in which Kennedy's brain symbolizes something that must be kept secret, and the result is reminiscent of an oppressively bleak Robin Cook novel. Mankell's heartfelt concern about this crisis is clear, but some readers will long for him to return to the Wallender series. An optional purchase unless Mankell is in demand.Michele Leber, Arlington, VA

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2007
Driven by the memory of seeing an African man die of AIDS, Mankell sets aside his Kurt Wallander series to deliver a scathing indictment of how drug companies exploit, and Western nations ignore, that continents mounting medical horrors. Theres nothing metaphorical about the core subject, but Mankell tempers his stridency by wrapping it inside a moving tale of loss. Swedish archaeologist Louise Cantor returns from the Greek dig site she oversees to find her son, Henrik, an apparent suicide. As unreasonable in her grief as any parent who loses a child, Cantor at first refuses to accept even the fact of his death and then sets out to prove he was murdered. The clues are scanthes found in pajamas when he always slept nude; his computer is missingbut a mother sometimes intuits more than the best police investigator can. As she puzzles over Henriks seeming obsession with the postautopsy disappearance of JFKs braina harbinger of high-level conspiracies and cover-upsand retraces her sons work with African AIDS patients, Cantor thinks in terms of reassembling pottery shards. But there may be vase breakers afoot willing to do anything to keep her from unearthing the truth. Meanwhile, a question keeps arising: Why is it that we know all about how Africans die, but hardly anything about how they live? This is a bracing, worthwhile read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)