On Midsummer's Eve, three role-playing teens dressed in eighteenth-century garb are shot in a secluded Swedish meadow. When one of Inspector Kurt Wallander's most trusted colleagues, someone whose help he hoped to rely on to solve the crime, also turns up dead, Wallander knows the murders are related. But with his only clue a picture of a woman no one in Sweden seems to know, he can't begin to imagine how.
Reeling from his father's death and facing his own deteriorating health, Wallander tracks the lethal progress of the killer. Locked in a desperate effort to catch him before he strikes again, Wallander always seems to be just one step behind.
About the Author :
Henning Mankell (1948-2015) was a Swedish author of award-winning mystery novels, children's books, drama, and television screenplays. He is best known for his Inspector Kurt Wallander mystery series, which was made into a television series starring Kenneth Branagh.
Reader of over 400 audiobooks, Dick Hill has won three coveted Audie awards and been nominated numerous times. He is also the recipient of several AudioFile Earphones Awards. AudioFile includes Dick on their prestigious list of "Golden Voices." Ebba Segerberg is a translator of Swedish literature with a focus on Swedish crime fiction. Her translations include several installments of the Wallander series by Henning Mankell and Let Me In by John Ajvide Lindqvist. She has worked in a variety of other genres and formats including biography, short stories, and screenplays. She holds a PhD in Swedish literature and film studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and currently lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Review :
"At the beginning of this engrossing, cerebral crime novel, narrator Dick Hill's reading has a chilly, remote quality that seems in keeping with the Swedish environs where the book takes place. And surely that is part of Hill's clever approach in this work...Hill's strategy becomes clear as the tensions rise, the emotions tighten, and the bodies accumulate...Hill's detachment eventually gives way with concussive impact, and he reveals himself as a master performer who has been unfolding a plan from the start. We have always been in expert hands."
-- "AudioFile"
"Lyrical, meticulous, and stunningly suspenseful."
-- "St. Petersburg Times"
"Mankell remains central to the flowering of a new, distinctly darker strain of the European hard-boiled crime novel."
-- "Booklist (starred review)"
"Satisfying in a way that has less to do with the wonders of forensic science than with the pure pleasure of rational thought."
-- "New York Times"
"Sure to please those who like weighty police procedurals...Mankell's writing is deadpan and stark, the plotting meticulous and exacting."
-- "Publishers Weekly"
"Typical of the dense, intricate intelligence that Mankell brings to detection and crime writing."
-- "Washington Post Book World"
