Sidetracked
In the award-winning Sidetracked , Kurt Wallander is called to a nearby rapeseed field where a teenage girl has been loitering all day long. He arrives just in time to watch her douse herself in gasoline and set herself aflame. The next day he is called to a beach where Sweden's former Minister of Justice has been axed to death and scalped. The murder has the obvious markings of a demented serial killer, and Wallander is frantic to find him before he strikes again. But his investigation is beset with a handful of obstacles--a department distracted by the threat of impending cutbacks and the frivolity of World Cup soccer, a tenuous long-distance relationship with a murdered policeman's widow, and the unshakably haunting preoccupation with the young girl who set herself on fire. Fascinating and astute, Sidetracked is a compelling mystery enhanced by keen social awareness.

"Presents Mankell at his best...if you haven't bought Sidetracked, do so ASAP." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"It is Wallander's voice...that captures us."
--The New York Times Book Review

Firewall
A body is found at an ATM the apparent victim of heart attack. Then two teenage girls are arrested for the brutal murder of a cab driver. The girls confess to the crime showing no remorse whatsoever. Two open and shut cases. At first these two incidents seem to have nothing in common, but as Wallander delves deeper into the mystery of why the girls murdered the cab driver he begins to unravel a plot much more involved complicated than he initially suspected. The two cases become one and lead to conspiracy that stretches to encompass a world larger than the borders of Sweden.

"Well-paced...a thinking man's thriller."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Satisfying.... [Mankell's] Sweden, cold, isolated and brimming with disappointment--is as intriguing a landscape as Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles or Charles Willeford's Miami."
--The Wall Street Journal

One Step Behind
On Midsummer's Eve, three role-playing teens dressed in eighteenth-century garb are shot in a secluded Swedish meadow. When one of Inspector Kurt Wallander's most trusted colleagues--someone whose help he hoped to rely on to solve the crime--also turns up dead, Wallander knows the murders are related. But with his only clue a picture of a woman no one in Sweden seems to know, he can't begin to imagine how. Reeling from his own father's death and facing his own deteriorating health, Wallander tracks the lethal progress of the killer. Locked in a desperate effort to catch him before he strikes again, Wallander always seems to be just one step behind.

"Lyrical, meticulous, and stunningly suspenseful."
--St. Petersburg Times

"Typical of the dense, intricate intelligence that Mankell brings to detection and crime writing."
--The Washington Post Book World

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