Sidetracked

Rating:
Summary: Not a whodunnit
Review: It's summer in Sweden, which is a very inconvenient time for a serial killer to start working. Wallander has planned a vacation with the new woman in his life, but his troubles begin when a mysterious girl kills herself in front of him and they continue when notable men start turning up dead and scalped.

You know very early on in _Sidetracked_ who did what to whom, the book isn't about shocker endings as much as it is about normal police work generating results. One of the nice thing about Wallander as a detective is that his guesses are often wrong-- one of the clear points being made in the book is that the detective job isn't about hunches, it's about research, people skills, and hard work.

A lot of the reviewers have made the comparison with Wahloo, but myself I was brought more to mind of Freeling's Castang mysteries. But a fine book indeed to be compared with either writer.

Rating:
Summary: Die falsche Fÿrhte
Review: Like several other readers I read the German version of this novel because a woman recommended it to my wife as giving beautiful descriptions of Swedish landscape. We know the highways around Ystad, Malmö and Helsingborg, but the book did not give me much flavor of Swedish geography. I found the beginning painfully slow, living only in Wallander's mind with too much repetition of his thoughts. At some point the story became gripping but by page 273 I hadn't understood the connnections between the murdered girl and the murdered men (good point for the book, or negative point for the reader..??). The ending was pretty weak though. Also, how was it with Baiba on the vacation near Skagen? Will I read another Wallander mystery? Not clear.

Update. The appeal of the interest in sociology of Commisar Wallender won me over. Am reading Brannvegg in Norwegian transl., fantastic from the start, maybe Inspector Wallender/Mankell at his best! Comes out in English...as 'Firewall'. Was near Ystad (Sandhammaren) while reading it this month, good place to read Mankell!.

Rating:
Summary: Very Good Police Procedural
Review: Older readers will recall the fine series of police procedurals featuring the Swedish policeman Martin Beck. These books, by the Swedish writers Wahloo and Sjowall, were nice combinations of crime fiction and social commentary. The Kurt Wallender series by Henning Mankell is a worthy successor to the Martin Beck books. The stories are well plotted with good characterization and an interesting central character. As with the Martin Beck books, an underlying theme is the reality of Swedish life as opposed to the goals of socialism.

Rating:
Summary: Very Good Police Procedural
Review: Older readers will recall the fine series of police procedurals featuring the Swedish policeman Martin Beck. These books, by the Swedish writers Wahloo and Sjowall, were nice combinations of crime fiction and social commentary. The Kurt Wallender series by Henning Mankell is a worthy successor to the Martin Beck books. The stories are well plotted with good characterization and an interesting central character. As with the Martin Beck books, an underlying theme is the reality of Swedish life as opposed to the goals of socialism.

Rating:
Summary: Complex psychological thriller, first rate murder mystery.
Review: Sidetracked was first published in Sweden in 1995, and now with Steven T. Murray's able translation, the United States audience will be able to read this Scandinavian thriller/murder mystery. Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series is very popular in Europe, and Sidetracked won the Best Crime Novel of the Year award there. Sidetracked is the third Kurt Wallander mystery, following Faceless Killers and The White Lioness. Mankell currently lives in exotic Mozambique. Inspector Kurt Wallander works at the police station in Ystad Sweden. He is divorced, ready to go on vacation with his girlfriend Baiba, and is undergoing the uncertainty of a new police chief, possible reorganization of his department, and a rising caseload. His nightmare begins with the suicide of an unknown girl in a farmer's rapeseed field: "Afterward Wallander would remember the burning girl in the rapeseed field the way you remember, with the greatest reluctance, a distant nightmare you'd rather forget. Even though he seemed to maintain at least an outward sense of calm for the entire evening and far into the night, later he could recall nothing but irrelevant details. Martinsson, Hansson, and especially Ann-Britt Höglund had been astonished by his impassiveness. But they couldn't see through the shield he had set up to protect himself. Inside him there was devastation like a house that had collapsed." Wallander's life becomes more complicated as a series of brutal axe murders surface. The motis operandi is basically the same, but with subtle differences. Wallander becomes obsessed with stopping the murderer and at the same time identifying the poor girl who had appeared in the rapeseed field and killed herself in such pain. Meanwhile, the murders continue, until Wallander becomes aware that the killer might be focusing on him. Sidetracked is a complex psychological thriller and a first rate murder mystery. It is told in the epic saga style of Scandinavia, complete with the dark richness of Sweden. Wallander is human, with limited resources which he stretches for a higher ideal. He is a hero.

Shelley Glodowski, Reviewer

Rating:
Summary: Important book.
Review: The fifht book about Kurt Wallander is set on one of the most memorable swedish summers of the 90's, 1994. The weather was wonderful, and all of Sweden were watching the fabolous swedish succes in the soccer world cup in the USA. Therefore it's fortunate that Mankell chose this year as setting for what was to be the Wallander-series masterpiece. Everything the other books tries to be, this one is. It's a horrifying novel of suspense, as well as a sharp comment on the swedish society. Wallander's brilliand mind, which in the other volumes is a bit too brilliant, is here dulled by the tiredness and confusion that springs from the shrewdness of the killer they can't seem to catch. In the most memorable of summers raves the most memorable of killers. Because, without turning this into a spoiler, I have to add that the killer's what gives the book the final touch, and makes it not only a great detective story, but a great novel, to.

Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: This book was my first "Wallander" and once started I simply could not put it down anymore. I read the German translation and I liked it very very much, although you should start with the first Wallander and then continue. The story is really exciting with interesting twists, which made me become a heavy "Wallander" fan.

Rating:
Summary: Worthwhile Procedural
Review: This is a strange, interesting story. Characteristically for Mankell, it opens arrestingly. The short prologue gives us a snapshot of Pedro Santana, a sugar plantation worker in the Dominican Republic. Years ago he got married to "the most beautiful girl he had ever seen" who then, for eight long years, failed to conceive a child. Now having at last done so, she is dying and leaves him with nothing but the baby daughter, Dolores, who, he now vows, will have a different, happier life.

The scene shifts to southern Sweden sixteen years later, where, as the 1994 World Cup gets under way, a brown-skinned young woman appears in a field of rape, apparently terrified, douses herself with petrol and sets herself alight. Chief Inspector Kurt Wallender is a witness to her death and the memory haunts him as he embarks on the hunt for a serial killer who kills his victims with an axe and scalps them.

Are these killings in any way related to the burning girl? Well, we find out, in a complex story about fathers and their children in a violent and dangerous world set against the backdrop of the kind of perfect summer in which, Wallander's outraged sentiments protest, monsters do not belong.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but could do without the PC stereotypes...
Review: This may be the best of the Wallander books. It is well written, but as always it is a bit boring (and predictable) that the "real bad guys" are always bankers, politicians and other "men of power". The actual murderers and killers in the Mankell books are always depicted as the "original victims" and virtually innocent since they are "victims of society" themselves. According to Mankell's view of the world, behind every petty case of shoplifting lurks a wealthy middle-aged white man somehow pulling the strings. This makes his storytelling quite predictable, since you can be sure that the case is solved as soon as Wallander starts suspecting a politically correct bad guy.

But as I said, this one is definitely one of the best of the Wallander books and I do recommend it!

Rating:
Summary: Interesting--fast read--page turner
Review: This was my first Wallander mystery, and I was pleasantly surprised...I actually enjoyed the procedural detail...It was very interesting to see how he arrived at his conclusions, and how everything came together...I felt the characters and the plot were well developed...it gave you plenty of information without going overboard...I cared about the characters... Although I didn't really like the ending...I would definately recommend it!