Customer Reviews

The Fifth Woman: A Kurt Wallander Mystery (6)

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Kurt Wallander is both the main character and setting of Mankell's 'procedural' crime series. While based in southern Sweden, "The Fifth Woman" is in fact grounded in the rugged landscape of Wallander's interior life - his memories, hopes, shopping lists, prejudices and anxieties. Not since Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder have I read such an angst-ridden and ethically driven protagonist. This is the ultimate introverted hero - he solves crimes using weapons of solitude, intuition, memory-interrogation and a phenonomenal eye for detail. How could you not love a policeman who reminds himself in the midst of the chase to book the laundry room, alert his superiors to a colleague's excessive workload or take time to grieve for his father. Mankell also provides a vivid account of the broader issues that confronted Swedish society in the 1990s - refugees, law and order, social capital and shifting moral foundations. Wallander characterises the times as an age where people have forgotten how to darn their socks, preferring to discard a blemish rather than repair a resource. And the storyline of "The Fifth Woman"? Like Laurie King's "Night Work", "The Fifth Woman" explores issues of violence, revenge and enforcing justice when the system cannot deliver. It is, like Mankell's other Wallander titles, a monumental chronicle of detail, connection and the unfolding of a tightly-bound investigation. The Swedish atmospherics will also help take one's mind off an endless summer.

Inspector Kurt Wallander is at it again. The reader should not be disappointed with this particular Mankell's psychological thriller that once again goes inside the Swedish criminal mind looking for answers to perplexing problems. Of all the Wallander novels to date, this one succeeds the best at being able to capture the concept of wickedness while promoting the strength of virtue. In this setting , we find Wallander attempting to solve a complex series of crimes involving the disappearance and murder of a number of apparently unrelated people in the Swedish town of Ystad. All he has to go on is a modus operandi that reflects a killer(s)who is earnestly seeking revenge by torturing his or her victims. Thrown in for good measure is the African connection that Mankell loves to exploit in order to tease the reader out of being too comfortable with the nordic setting. As usual, it is Wallander and his team of unassuming and low-paid cops who methodically take this case apart, layer by layer, as they establish a timeline that links the homicides to a serial killer operating in their midst. This novel offers sufficient momentum to move the reader from place to place on the Swedish physical and mental landscapes. By time the killer is revealed near the end, we are well equipped with a thorough plotline and a consistent character profile to determine who the culprit really is. No unwelcome surprises await the reader at end. Paralleling the main thrust of the book is the opportunity to get inside Wallander's personal life. Here we often see a whirl of fear, loathing, love and ill-will take up residence in the mind of the great detective in his seemingly tireless search for clues. Like the rest of us, he has his personal battles and demons to contend with as he seeks answers to the bigger issues of life like what motives people to kill each other in inexplicably horrific fashion. What I discovered anew in this book is that while society continues to struggle with those of its members who are set on criminally destroying it , Mankell attempts to build it up by promoting decency, kindness and above all else an abiding rule of law. Each of the pieces of the puzzle in this story are well developed with respect to character, flow of action, setting, and ultimate purpose. Where the novel might bog down a tad is in the plodding pace Wallander the devoted detective tends to work as he moves between various criminal scenes. That and the incredible detail the reader is expected to carry between these points in pursuit of justice is not ordinary. Reading a Wallander novel is truly an experience never to be forgotten because it puts one squarely in the shoes and mindset of the chief investigator himself. No sitting on the sidelines with this one if you want to be there at end to make the all-important arrest. Great stuff for an evening read by the fire on a cold nordic night! This is truly an unforgettable adventure into the world of modern police forensics.

I started reading this mystery novel just after having finshed reading Stieg Larsson's riveting mystery trilogy about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Whereas this book is not of the same calibre, it is compelling reading - enough so for me to want to read the other novels in the Kurt Wallander series as well. The Swedes surely have some fine writers.

I picked up "The Fifth Woman" by Henning Mankell because a reviewer favorably compared it to the classic "The Laughing Policeman" by Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo (Swedish wife/husband writing team). It doesn't disappoint. This is a book that is worth the price of a hardcover -- meaty, substantive, intricately/well plotted, with great characters.

The three things I noticed that bind all three authors in their works are: 1) the Swedish people's dislike and distrust of the police, 2) the chill and loneliness that seems to pervade human relationships, and 3) police inspectors who are brilliant, meticulous, conscientious, introspective and given to depression. These Swedish police procedurals are not a barrel of laughs, but rather they are thoughtful, well written, and original.

"The Fifth Woman" starts out with the murders in Africa of 4 nuns and a female visitor. The rest of the novel takes place with these murders' ramifications in Sweden where a serial killer is dispatching men, each very differently. The title refers not only to the 5th woman murdered in Africa, but also the 5th woman in Sweden who leads police inspector, Kurt Wallander, to the Swedish serial murderer.

American police procedurals tend to reveal more murder motives from the get-go. In this novel the motive is a core plot element and isn't revealed until later in the book. The reader also knows a few things about the killer early in the book that the police don't know and it is fascinating to watch the police reach the "same place in the book" as the reader. I was reading a well regarded American mystery writer and stopped the book to read "The Fifth Woman". When I returned to the American book after finishing Mankell's opus, it was sophmoric in comparison. This is a book for the serious mystery reader and well worth the effort.

Henning Mankell really nails you to your reading chair from page one with his subtle and quiet horror stories where there is a minimum of the graphical violence you so often see in American thrillers these days. Mankell has an ingenius way of building up his stories which will keep you mystified till the end. He is also weaving into the fabric a honest description of Sweden on the social level and of how police work is developing in the Scandinavian countries. You get to like this Wallander and his Swedish colleagues so much that you are sad when the last page is turned.

Detective Kurt Wallander is professionally cautious and thoughtful (dull), personally abrupt, a bit on the insensitive side. Wallander struggles to accept his father's death, and wonders if he can build a new life for himself, maybe remarry, maybe buy a house and a dog. He philosophizes a bit about the apparent rise of violent crime in Sweden. It crosses his mind more than once to give up police work.

This is probably more realistic than many detective stories, because there's no Sherlockian detection going on-- just a roomful of cops going over a collection of facts they've gone over more than once already. They're tired. They haven't had any sleep. You really feel their fatigue. And it takes the cops forever to notice clues, long after Mankell has revealed them to the reader. I wanted to scream, "Open the drawer!!! Would you look in the freakin' desk drawer!!!" and the like.

With Kurt Wallander swedish author Henning Mankell has created one of these sympathetic if low-key protagonists that become very dear to the readers' heart as the single story and ultimately the different mysteries continue. He reminds me in many ways of his Israeli counterpart Miachael Ohayon, created by the great mystery writer Batya Gur. But of course Sweden is very different from Israel and the small town of Ystad is no Jerusalem. When two gruesome murders happen in the small community, Kurt Wallander is immediately torn out of reminiscences from his recent Italy vacation with his father and has to immerse himself in a strange and very dark reality. At the same time the reader follows the steps of the killer and sees a complex personality and story build as a race against time heats up for the Ystad police. The novel is well-written, atmospherically dense, intense and keeps a good pace all the way to the well-developed conclusion. Mankell has no loose ends remaining at the end of this story, yet the reader is sad to say farewell to Kurt once more.

Fans of the Maj Sjowall/ Per Wahloo Martin Beck series will be right at home here in Henning Mankell's modern-day Sweden. We're on familiar turf as a tray of home-made rusks is offered to detective Kurt Wallander. (What are they, anyway?) "The Fifth Woman" is a taut, suspenseful, hard-to-put-down detective novel that combines all the best of the Sjowall/Wahloo series with an updated look at Sweden in the '90s. (Perhaps not so different from that Sweden of the '60s and '70s.) And if it's possible, readers of previous Mankells in the series will be glad to know that Mankell gets better with each novel.

Swedish writer Mankell's graceful, unadorned prose provides an affecting voice for his melancholy protagonist, Ystad police detective Kurt Wallander, whose own mid-life difficulties give way to the pursuit of a cunning serial killer.

As the book opens, a woman receives information that her mother has been murdered along with four nuns in an African convent, the crime hushed up. Then an old man who writes bird poetry is impaled on sharpened bamboo stakes embedded in a ditch on his property while the woman watches from his bird tower.

Wallander, just home from a pleasant trip to Italy with his father, a rejuvenation of their taciturn relationship, investigates a break-in at a flower shop from which nothing was taken, receives reports of a growing vigilante militia movement and eventually discovers the body of the bird poet. Meanwhile the reader learns that the flower shop proprietor is a captive, slowly starving. He is missing more than a week - supposedly on an orchid-buying trip - before anyone realizes.

The grisly narrative builds slowly, in plain, unhurried cadences. The fits, starts and frustrations of police procedure mingle with Wallander's concerns for his father and plans for a future with his lover, Baiba - all against a thrum of background tension - the bound, terrified man, the woman ticking off plans on a meticulous schedule, selecting her next victim.

As the murder count rises, Wallander and his team delve into the background of the victims, uncovering dark secrets, making tenuous connections, inching toward a solution that horrifies them all. Mankell's ("Fearless Killers," "Sidetracked") plot organization and pacing is masterful and his perplexing, atmospheric story is all the more gripping delivered in measured, understated prose.

Ystad, Sweden is not a place where one would expect a homicide wave. Yet three brutal murders have shook up the citizens and stunned the police. Inspector Kurt Wallander sees no link between the vicious killings except that they were all well planned in advance and fierce and slow in terms of the victim.

Wallander and his staff begin looking for an apparent serial killer. However, to the shock of the Inspector, evidence points towards a female culprit. While the law enforcement officials struggle to switch paradigms, the killer becomes angrier, more hateful, bolder and deadlier. Even Wallander wonders if the killer can truly be a genius and a lunatic at the same time?

THE FIFTH WOMAN is the fourth Wallander tale to come to the States and like its predecessors is a fine police investigative novel. The story line slowly evolves as the audience spends much time inside the minds of Wallander and his foe. This turns the who-done-it into more of a psychological thriller than a typical serial killer investigation normally is. Not for anyone who wants fast-paced in your face action, Henning Mankell provides those readers who enjoy a more gradual speed with a wonderful police procedural.

Harriet Klausner