On the personal side, daughter Linda is changing directions again and if one has read the rest of the titles in the series, it is clear that sooner or later she is going to circle around to her father's line of work - although I am not willing to guess whether they set up as PIs or she becomes a cop. Also, Kurt is scheduled to go on holiday with Baiba. He is afraid that the case will prevent him from leaving - and he refuses to return her calls because he can't figure out how to tell her that this is a possibility. His father has an "episode" and he is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He asks a final favor of Wallander - a visit to Italy.
The killer has chosen to name himself after J.Edgar and imagines that Geronimo speaks to him. This is the first language misstep that I have noticed in this series. He names himself "Hoover." No one in Sweden seems to think it is funny - they think it is an unusual name - but that is it. So it probably made no difference at all there. Here, I think most people, even those of us who remember J.Edgar as the head of the FBI, think of vacuum cleaners when we encounter the name. It is a bit jarring in situations that are in no way amusing.
The title is tied to Wallander's sense from the very beginning that he is missing something and that this oversight is taking him in the wrong direction. In this book the murders are clearly tied together by the MO, but there are also pronounced differences which lead them away from the primary connection between the victims. We finally in this book see Wallander as a philosophical cop who expands the evidence into a theory which he must then convince others to buy into - in spite of the lack of direct evidence. He pieces fragments together into a compelling scenario, and saves the killer's last intended victims - Wallander himself and his daughter Linda.
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