The White Lioness by Henning Mankell

I have become a pretty big fan of what is sometimes called Nordic Noir. These are crime dramas set in Scandinavia that usually have a bleak vibe and a noirish feel. I’ve read several of the books and watched a few of the cinematic and television adaptations.

Kurt Wallander is a character created by Swedish author Henning Mankell. His stories have been adapted numerous times, most notably as a Swedish TV series and a British one starring Kenneth Branagh.

I think I’ve seen the first episode of both series. I think I liked them, but not well enough to keep up with them. I’m always getting distracted.

A while back, I was in Gardner’s, my favorite Tulsa bookshop, and I came across some of the Wallander books. They didn’t have the first one in the series, so I more or less grabbed this one at random. Probably because it has a cool cover featuring an X-ray of a pistol.

I liked The White Lioness, but I didn’t love it.

Wallander is your fairly typical noir detective. He’s good at his job, but not a Poirot or a Sherlock Holmes with an almost supernatural mental ability. He’s dogged about it; once he locks into a case, he drops everything else in his life to solve it. So he doesn’t have much of a personal life, and what he does has is in shambles. He tends to do things his own way, not by the book. This causes him some trouble at the office. But he solves his cases, so he’s mostly left to it.

This story begins with a missing person. An elderly, very religious woman has disappeared. She was a realtor, and before she went missing, she was supposed to be checking out a potential house to sell. It is located way out in the boonies, and as Wallander is looking for it, a nearby house explodes. They discover some odd radio equipment inside and the severed finger of a black man in the yard.

Sweden apparently doesn’t have a large African population, so this seems very strange. Especially since they do not find the rest of the body, and the finger was clearly severed with a blade and didn’t come off from the explosion.

Finding the missing woman, figuring out why someone would blow up a house out in the middle of nowhere, and what happened to the rest of that man are all good mysteries. Figuring out if they are at all connected could make for a great story.

But then the book more or less solves the mysteries within the next few chapters. It switches from Wallander’s perspective to several South Africans. The book was written not long after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, during some massive political changes in the country.

In this story, several white supremacists don’t like those changes and work on a conspiracy to assassinate a prominent person, which will throw the country into chaos. The finger belongs to a potential assassin who was sent to Sweden to be trained by a former Russian KGB agent.

For the rest of the book, we’ll switch back and forth between Wallander trying to solve the mystery we already know the answer to and what’s going on with the assassin and the people who have hired him. And then once Wallander figures out what’s going on, it becomes a race to stop the assassination from happening.

I find I’m not a big fan of mysteries that solve the crime early. I don’t usually want to see things from the killer’s perspective and know what they did and how they did it before the final chapters. That destroys the mystery. Turning it from a whodunnit into a will our hero catch them before it’s too late isn’t nearly as interesting.

Usually. There are lots of exceptions to that rule. A well-done story can still make me enjoy it even if I know who the killer is from the get-go.

I think part of my problem here is that while this is the third Wallander book to be written, it is my first to read. I’m still getting to know the character, so every time it switched away from him, I was annoyed.

But I also just didn’t find the South African stuff that interesting. I wonder if some of that might be that Mankell is a white Swedish man writing about South African apartheid and that just doesn’t feel right. You can tell he’s done his research, and he’s trying to do the story justice, but it never quite connected.

But I do really like the Wallander character, and I’ll definitely be checking out more of his stories.