Sidetracked

Mr. Mankell's story about a bizarre Geromino-Hoover serial killer is a great study of life inside and outside the police department. All his characters are finely drawn, and the atmosphere is fairly dripping with fluid description. Inspector Wallender is among the very best of today's thoughtful and slightly burned out police detectives, and the social background here is done beautifully,too. The 3 flaws are(1) we know the killer too soon, which makes this reviewer less likely to turn the pages,(2) Wallender's forgetfulness of losing his keys,(3)his forgetfulness in checking out photos of the crime scene.This gives away nothing in this otherwise near perfect realistic, contemporary European thriller.

Inspector Kurt Wallander of the Ystad police force in south Sweden has to solve his most challenging murder case yet: somebody is killing off elderly men using an axe to split their skulls and scalping them afterwards. It is clear that the killer is meticulously preparing his killings, staking out the victims and making sure nobody sees him. The team of policemen and -women seems to be always one step behind and even the profiler that has come to help them has problems coming up with a good profile of the killer. What makes this book special is that the reader also gets the perspective of the killer: it soon becomes clear who he is and why he does what he is doing. This could be a major handicap as the book may loose most of its excitement of the "whodunnit", but here this is not the case. This is mainly due to the fact that Kurt Wallander is a full-fetched character with good and bad traits, doubts, hypochondric moments and moments of sudden,clear insight, making it a pleasure to follow how, in the end, he solves the case.

After reading a German translation of the original Swedish version of "Sidetracked" by Henning Mankell, I was enthralled by the complexity of the plot and of the main character, Kurt Wallander. Reading this book(my first by Mankell), my apppetite to continue reading his books grew steadily. I had never been a fan of niether murder mysteries nor detective novels, but this book really changed my mind. I highly recommend this to any reader.

Here is the problem with Henning Mankell: He writes so well and his plots are so gripping that reading his books almost becomes an obsession.

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