Sidetracked (Villospår)

⚖The case for it

The misery arrives on a schedule: the failing father, the bad diet, the distant daughter, the state-of-Sweden brooding every thirty pages whether you want it or not. Notice, though, what the standard serial-killer plot is actually carrying. The scalps and the girl burning alive in a rapeseed field are the hook; the real subject is a tired, decent policeman watching the tolerant country he believed in come apart. The prose is flat, but so is Wallander, and that flatness does the work: no genius, just a man who keeps showing up. Start here; it is the best of them.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Wallander's miseries arrive on schedule: the failing father, the distant daughter, the bad diet, the brooding over Sweden's decline delivered as interior monologue every thirty pages. Mankell's social diagnosis is earnest and administered in lectures, the translation's English is flat as a motorway, and underneath sits a standard serial-killer engine, scalps and all, of a kind the genre builds annually.

— the honest librarian