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Feb 10, 2012canary35 rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
I loved the Wallander series on PBS with Kenneth Branagh as the gray and brittle detective, Wallander. (I mean - who does not love Kenneth Branagh?) This novel is by Henning Mankell, who also wrote the Wallander novels upon which that series is based. This story begins with a wolf. Then there is a horrific murder. For me, two things pervade this novel. One is the curious refusal of the main character, Birgitta Roslin, a judge in Sweden, to tell anyone in her family about the unusual events that begin to cascade in her life as she discovers that two of the murdered people are the foster parents of her mother. Why? Why do people in novels keep these secrets? In this book at least, there is a judicial oath, so the silence is not an unexpectedly clumsy attempt by a great writer to create suspense, but instead, here is a character with tightly contained integrity. That took me a while to understand. The second thing that pervades the novel is the weather – specifically the cold, Swedish winter: a white ghost which haunts every paragraph. So cold, even in Beijing. Even in summer, even in London. Even in America’s heartland in the 1860’s. With Mankell, only a partial thaw is expected.