I'd seen the TV dramatisations (English and both Swedish) but I had only read one of the Wallander books, the less-than-satisafactory The Pyramid. Essentially, I concluded that Mankell was a pioneer of Nordic Noir, noteworthy but a little staid. Then I laid hands on this, his latest and very definitely the last of Wallander.
This novel transcends genre. A crime novel in which the crime is never fully solved, with an espionage background in which nothing is as it seems. More than anything it is a novel of character, with the sixty-year-old Wallander running up against the dying of the light.
The story itself is nothing much but the character development is the work of a master. And no author has ever disposed of the character who made him world-famous in so sudden, so devastating a manner. Reichenbach Falls? Pah - hooey! Check out the last page of this beauty.
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