Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. The tension never relaxes, and most readers will surely persevere through the final blood-soaked, despairing pages, which attain a truly mesmerizing power.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. But it suffers intermittently from the redundancy and slow pacing that likewise afflict Mankell’s mystery novels. This impressive novel is intensely detailed and beautifully constructed, and it vibrates with a palpable and genuinely frightening sense of doom. This image mocks the white man’s fantasy of reclaiming a land with no future, and eventually drives Olofson away from the egg farm he had coincidentally acquired, and the destiny he had naively believed lay ahead of him. Subsequently, determined to honor Janine’s dream of service to Africa’s suffering natives, he arrives in Zambia shortly before violence sparked by warring tribes claims the lives and property of well-meaning white settlers, and incarnates the indigenous myth of a leopard and crocodile locked together in unending mortal conflict.
He bullies Sture into an incapacitating misadventure, and has perhaps inadvertently driven Janine to suicide. Young Hans, who seeks relief from his father’s depressive rages (after Hans’s mother had abandoned them) in friendships with a well-to-do older boy (Sture) and a young woman (Janine), facially disfigured in a surgical accident, loses both of them. In juxtaposed parallel chapters, Mankell ( Kennedy’s Brain, 2007, etc.) vividly chronicles protagonist Hans Olofson’s early years in rural Sweden, living with his alcoholic father during the 1950s, and Olofson’s ordeal in Zambia in the early 1970s, whence he had relocated hoping to complete an odyssey that was only dreamed about by a boyhood acquaintance unable to make the journey herself.
This previously untranslated novel from the Swedish author, best known for his Kurt Wallender mysteries, tells the complex story of a rootless Swede’s perilous and disillusioning African experience.
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