Sidetracked (Villospår)

⚖The case for it

A teenage girl douses herself in fuel in a rapeseed field while Wallander watches from too far away, and that opening is what every reader names first. Mankell threads the case through the rest of Wallander’s life, his father’s Alzheimer’s, the friction with Linda, the long-distance thing with Baiba, so the work never floats free of the man doing it. The procedure is “diligent, dogged, low-fuss, methodical,” and Wallander is frightened and wrong often enough to be worth following. Skåne is a real flat place on the page. “So far his finest novel.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Five hundred pages at a “punishing length and glacial pace,” with procedural detail elaborated past the point of interest and a middle that stops moving. Wallander’s depression is total enough that “it makes me depressed just to read about him,” and his opera cassettes and brooding read as tics standing in for character, with more than one reviewer unable to work out “why Wallander himself is much-loved.” He also takes risks with his own safety that readers find hard to credit. The Baiba subplot sits beside the case rather than inside it. “Phoned-in, plot and character-wise.”

— the honest librarian

8h

honest hours

11

sittings