Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell

Maybe I should reconsider reading three books at one time…plots and characters become neglected and then it’s a matter of making sure I have the right plot in my head and remembering who is who. At least book #3 is a scifi book – that’s pretty easy to keep straight. But I read Purgatory Ridge and this one at the same time and that got to be a bit much in the police-thriller category. 

This is Book #2 in the Kurt Wallander series. The premise of the book is (from Goodreads.com): Sweden, winter, 1991. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off. A few days later a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead. The dead men were criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit. But what appears to be an open-and-shut case soon takes on a far more sinister aspect. Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea, to Riga in Latvia, where he is plunged into a frozen, alien world of police surveillance, scarcely veiled threats, and lies. Doomed always to be one step behind the shadowy figures he pursues, only Wallander's obstinate desire to see that justice is done brings the truth to light.


Wallander is seriously always a step behind. In the foggy depths of his depressed brain - where he’s still lamenting the loss of his police partner, his divorce, his estranged relationship with his daughter and trying to cope with his father’s dementia - he’s fallen in love with a woman in Latvia, and more than “a desire to see that justice is done” is he wants to save her. Perhaps a psychological manifestation that if he can’t save anything else in his life, perhaps he can save this woman.


Seriously, Kurt Wallander makes Arkady Renko (Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith) look like he’s on uppers and Marad Audran (George Alex Effinger) the epitome of normal.  Still, there is something about the Swedish landscape and Kurt's dogged determination that keeps me turning the pages.  

Recommended if you don't mind a gloomy landscape and a depressed cop.