Before the Frost by Henning Mankell Translated by Ebba Segerberg

Wallander figures heavily in this book, but the story centers around his daughter Linda who has finished her course at the police academy and is waiting to join the Ystad police force.

Although the action of the story takes place entirely in Sweden (except for a ferry jaunt or two to Copenhagen and the prologue in the voice of the murderer), Mankell ties in international connections. The prologue is about the Jim Jones mass suicide in Guyana. At the end of the final chapter the people at the police station are gathered in the break room for a special news report on television from the United States, the date is September 11, 2001. He doesn't tell the story, he just assumes that his readers will recognize what is going on. The two incidents seem to be parentheses bracketing another story of madness on a global scale.

The story itself begins with more than the usual dose of gruesomeness - the bad lures a group of wild swans to him, douses them with gasoline, and sets them on fire. The series of incidents of this type is never adequately justified even from the perspective of the warped mind of the killer. Nor is his primary doctrine for selecting his victims.

The thread which holds the story together is the contentious relationship between father and daughter. And, unfortunately, both come off seeming rather irrational. We have seen glimpses of violent temper from Wallander in the past, but it is a constant in this book. There seems to be no solid pattern - this behavior on Linda's part brings on a fit of rage from her father, that behavior does not, but the next time similar actions on Linda's part provoke opposite responses from Wallander. And on the other side, since the story is told from Linda's point of view, we never are sure whether she adores him or fears him.

The mystery is resolved, but the story seems to be more about fathers and daughters. The relationship between Linda and her father is tangled with the even more disfunctional relationship between Linda's friend Anna and her father.

Mankell apparently dropped this as a continuing series. Perhaps he is not comfortable with women protagonists, not uncommon among male writers. Consider Heinlein and his endless parade of female leading characters who were never quite plausible. Linda is emotionally and personally involved in this story in a way that her father has never been. The crimes all come to him in the normal course of his job. That is difficult as a continuing thing - after all, where are all the red shirts going to come from if they are personally connected to a character who has very few personal connections.