Another dark, moody Swedish murder mystery. The central character is police detective Kurt Wallander. The name is reminescent of Lisbeth Salander, but that's about the only similarity between The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and this one. Wallander is a cop with all the cop angst and personal problems. His wife is divorcing him, his daughter refuses to see him, his father is lapsing into senility, he is an alcoholic, and he doesn't even have a dog to run away.
I think the only time we see anything from any point of view other than that of Wallander is the opening chapter in which an elderly farmer realizes that something is wrong at the farm next to theirs in their remote valley and discovers that his neighbor has been brutally murdered and his wife tortured.
From there on we follow police procedure through a long painful investigation that goes by fits and starts and frequently stalls in dead ends. The original crime precipitates another, which is solved; and another criminal enterprise is uncovered along the way, but the perpetrators of the original crime elude our hero. Although the investigation stalls a couple of times, the story never does, somehow.
The double murder is finally solved, not by a fortuitous discovery, but by a late flash of policeman's intuition. Rather satisfying.
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