July 31, 2000
Dr. Gerald Ashenden, "Ireland's justly famous thoracic surgeon," is lucky to escape with only a broken shoulder after being trampled by his gray stallion, Thor, ridden by his pregnant granddaughter, Rowena Keegan, in this nominal cozy marred by clumsy, overheated dialogue ("That murderous attack on Gerald! Oh, no, Inspector! I did nothing of the kind!"), short, choppy chapters (81 in all) and improbable detail (a "glass-fronted" police station). Rowena's plucky American friend, language expert Torrey Tunet, is sure Rowena didn't run down her grandfather deliberately. But when someone shoots Thor with the tip of a knitting needle, causing the horse to throw Ashenden to his death, Torrey has her work cut out to prove Rowena's innocence. In her hunt for the real murderer, Torrey discovers that the doctor had a few skeletons in the closet: a blackmailing grandson, a jilted Danish girlfriend and a plot to induce abortion through an overdose of X-rays. Will Rowena get an abortion? Who's the father? Could it be a case of incest? Such questions as these generate some tension and suspense, but Deere, author of one previous mystery (The Irish Cottage Murder), has yet to learn how to convince--at the climax, the police gather a bunch of suspects together and question them as a group. The revelation that the killer used a child's popgun to shoot Thor with the knitting needle is the final absurdity, while the reason Thor attacked his master remains a mystery. (Aug.) THE FIFTH WOMAN: A Kurt Wallander Mystery Henning Mankell. New Press, $24.95 (432p) ISBN 1-56584-547-1 ~ At the start of this Swedish version of the station-house police procedural, set in the Sk ne district in the south of Sweden, Det. Kurt Wallander, who has just returned from an idyllic vacation in Rome, joins the hunt for the missing Holger Eriksson, an elderly poet. Finding the man's corpse in a ditch, impaled on sharpened bamboo stakes, brings Wallander back abruptly to the realities of crime in modern Sweden. While Wallander and his colleagues investigate the murder, another man is found dead in the local woods, making it clear that they have a brutal serial killer on their hands. The killer plans each murder carefully to ensure that the victim suffers for several days before dying. Who could hate these innocent-seeming men so much as to want to torture them to death? The police detectives must delve deeply into the victims' lives to find out what links them together and what might have made them a deadly enemy. Mankell takes the reader slowly and meticulously through the long investigation's progress, including frequent reversals. The policemen are constantly overworked and exhausted, but they make acute deductions and chase down every lead relentlessly. Mankell is a talented writer, and the translation by Steven Murray is graceful and colloquial, but the narrative is so bleak and brooding that it certainly qualifies as the darkest of Swedish noir. (Aug.) UNDER PRESSURE Abigail Reed. Forge, $6.99 (416p) ISBN 0-812-53928-1 ~ Reed's newest is a story of sexual harassment that begins when Karyn Christophe takes a job in the fashion department of Cybelle, a glamorous retail chain. There, Karyn's early days fuel her hopes that she can rebuild her life after a disastrous marriage, but trouble arises in the form of Lou Hechter, the department head. Brash and slimy, Lou has a penchant for harassing his female employees with lewd suggestions and even lewder acts. Unbeknownst to Karyn, he has been blackmailing her new boss, Cilla Westheim, into a secret sexual liaison for years. Tangled in her own web of shame and fear, Cilla is...
Starred review from June 1, 2000
The fourth book in Mankell's excellent series opens with the bloody killings of four nuns and a Swedish tourist (the fifth woman) in Algeria, then switches to the carefully staged murder of a wealthy retired car dealer in Ystad, Sweden. Even as Inspector Kurt Wallander and his cohorts tirelessly work the car-dealer case, the perpetrator obsessively plots her next murder, dispatching the victim as if all her life were meant for this killing moment. Wallander somehow uncovers the ties that bind these apparently disparate events together. The intricate plotting, chilling psychological divination, and thrilling police procedural are all seamlessly translated. Fans of Maj Sj wall and Per Wahl 's mysteries will enjoy this crime novel by their fellow countryman. Highly recommended.
Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from July 1, 2000
Much of the attraction of the American hard-boiled hero has been his (or her) unfailing ability to do what we could only dream of doing: stand up to danger with competence, courage, and a smart mouth. Recently, the European hard-boiled novel has taken the subgenre in a largely new direction: the heroes of this new breed of crime novel respond to the chaos of the modern world with sinking shoulders; they persevere but always with a sense that they--and their troubled countries--won't be able to take much more. Listen to Swedish cop Kurt Wallander: "He saw himself as a pathetic figure, a police officer in a thin sweater, battling the wind in a desolate Swedish town in the fall." In the fourth Wallander novel to be translated into English--all with remarkable fluidity by Steven Murray--the sense of the center failing to hold is stronger than ever. While grieving the sudden death of his father, Wallander is confronted with an incredibly gruesome murder: a man impaled by sharpened bamboo sticks. More killings, nearly as grisly, follow, but Wallander is unable to find a connection. The unfathomable case puts even more strain on Wallander's always tenuous personal relationships--"I live my life always disappointing people." This sense of being on the edge of overwhelmed, of always falling just a bit short, is utterly alien to, say, the world of Sam Spade, but it feels very much like ordinary life in the new century. Remember Kurt Wallander: his exhaustion may signal more than a literary style. ((Reviewed July 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)