The Fifth Woman (A Kurt Wallander
Mystery) by Henning Mankell
Another Excellent Wallender
Fifth in the Kurt Wallander series.
"The Fifth Woman" is another in author Henning Mankill's superb series of
police procedurals starring his melancholy Swedish detective Kurt
Wallander. This novel, like the others in the series, is set in and around
the Southern Swedish city of Ystad, and is as much about the characters
and their social environment as about the crime itself.
In a brief prologue, the reader learns of the murder of a woman's mother
while traveling in Africa, and its coverup by local police. This awful event is
somehow the trigger which will unleash a terrible violence, the nature of
which the reader is only briefly left to guess at.
The story properly begins with the brutal murder, by a pit full of pungi
stakes, of an aging birdwatcher and poet. Detective Kurt Wallander, just
returned from a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome with his aging father, is
assigned the case. The perpetrator has left few clues. Wallander and his
crew have little to work with until they painfully begin to make connections
with other seemingly unrelated events: a break-in at a florist shop, a
woman who went missing from a northern Swedish village years earlier, a
mysterious visitor to a maternity ward in Ystad, and a railroad timetable. At
the end of the investigative road is an alarming killer whom the police could
not have foreseen.
"The Fifth Woman" features Mankill's astonishingly meticulous plotting and
superb characters, not least Wallander himself, a dedicated, intuitive cop
who suffers through a family tragedy while on the case. "The Fifth
Woman" is very highly recommended to fans of Henning Mankill's
Wallander Mysteries.
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