The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell

Someone reminded me that our Swedish cop, a couple of books back, went on indefinite leave from his job suffering from depression after killing a man in the line of duty - as cop drama would have it - a righteous shoot. He was on leave for eighteen months apparently without treatment or supervision. Definitely not the way things are handled in American police forces. In this one I am finally realizing that depression is part of Wallander's personality - and it seems to apply pretty generally to many of his colleagues as well. His father has died, within days of their trip to Rome - and he is not merely grieving, but feeling guilty because they had not repaired their relationship years earlier. One of his officers is shot and nearly dies and he obsesses because he didn't know that the suspect was armed.

Hamlet is frequently referred to as the "melancholy Dane" - are Swedes also given to melancholia? I've heard that Finns are, it probably has something to do with the lack of sunlight in the far north.

We have again the satisfaction of deserving victims in this book. The octogenarian bird watcher and the florist/orchid fancier have dark pasts which have caused the killer to select them for fairly gruesome deaths.

There are two layers to the title of the book. We know one from the very beginning that Wallander does not discover until the very end. The killer's mother was killed along with a group of nuns somewhere in Africa and the letter that she finally receives from a police officer there sets things in motion. It seems that the international press were given the story of the four nuns, but the powers-that-be elected to suppress the fact that a Swedish tourist was also murdered. They essentially wrote her out of existence. The young officer while going through the dead woman's possessions finds several unfinished letters to her daughter and is persuaded that she must notify the daughter of what has happened in spite of the possible repercussions affecting her own career. The second "fifth woman" is the killer herself. As Wallander follows chains of conjecture he senses that there is a "fifth woman" just out of reach.

The next one of these I have on paper. My sequential reading has finally caught up with the stack of books that a friend loaned me back about spring break. Still, these are so grim that I need to read something in a warmer climate before going on to the next one.