Product Description

Third in the Kurt Wallander series.

The execution-style murder of a Swedish housewife looks like a simple case even though there is no obvious suspect. But then Wallander learns of a determined stalker, and soon enough, the cops catch up with him. But when his alibi turns out to be airtight, they realize that what seemed a simple crime of passion is actually far more complex—and dangerous. The search for the truth behind the killing eventually uncovers an assassination plot, and Wallander soon finds himself in a tangle with both the secret police and a ruthless foreign agent. Combining compelling insights into the sinister side of modern life with a riveting tale of international intrigue, The White Lioness keeps you on the knife-edge of suspense.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22831 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-13
• Released on: 2003-05-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400031559
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Like his countrymen Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Mankell writes mysteries that connect crimes in Sweden to the rest of the world. Faceless Killers (1997), the first of his books about provincial police inspector Kurt Wallender to appear here, involved Turkish immigrants and Eastern European villains. This novel, written in 1993, links the murder of a real estate agent in Wallender's town of Ystad to South Africa, where Nelson Mandela has just been released from prison, and to Russia, where the KGB is busy planning Mandela's fate. Wallender is a classically dour but dedicated policeman whose progress through his cases is a combination of hard slogging and lucky breaks. But several factors render this effort less compelling than its predecessor. The first is the Day of the Jackal syndrome: we know that Mandela wasn't killed by KGB agents or white Afrikaner terrorists, and that knowledge makes the suspense writer's job even harder. Second is the book's length?560 pages is a long haul, even with three exotic settings and dozens of important characters. Third might be Thompson's translation, which?unlike Steven T. Murray's work on Faceless Killers?often seems excessively deadpan. But Wallender is still a solid character, whose strengths and weaknesses are utterly credible, and Mankell (who now lives in Mozambique) knows how to make the most of his virtues.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Mankell's Faceless Killers , the Swedish author's first novel to appear in English, introduced Kurt Wallander, an Old World cop on the edge of being overwhelmed by New World crime. Wallander returns in this less compelling but still memorable case involving an assassination attempt on Nelson Mandela in 1990. The disappearance of a Swedish housewife--murdered by an ex-KGB agent training the would-be assassin, hired by right-wing Afrikaaners--draws Wallander into the tangle of South African politics. The action jumps from Sweden to South Africa, where President de Klerk struggles to bring his country into an apartheid-free new era. The massive scope of the novel--race relations in South Africa, on one hand, Wallander's personal travails in distant Sweden, on the other--proves a bit unwieldy, but the action is skillfully grounded in human rather than political concerns: the ambiguous moral position of the black assassin, Wallander's single-minded determination to explain the housewife's death, the tortured psyche of the Afrikaaner leader. If Mankell's reach slightly exceeds his grasp here, his stature as a major voice in international crime fiction remains undisturbed. Bill Ott

From Kirkus Reviews
The second in a series chronicling the adventures of Sweden's Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander (Faceless Killers, 1997), and a Viking-sized saga it has grown to be. An ordinary Swedish housewife suddenly disappears. Her neighbors, friends, husband, all are mystifiedespecially since she led such an exemplary life. But sure enough, a few days later, she's found brutally murdered, her body stuffed into a well. There's no obvious suspect at first, but then Wallander learns of a stalkeran excitable type whose interest in the attractive young woman was apparently not discouraged in the slightest by several firm admonitions to get lost. Now that she's dead, he can't be found in his usual haunts. The cops go after him, fully confident that it's a crime of passion they're dealing with, to be resolved only once the heavy-breather is taken into custody. Soon enough, they do catch himcatch up with him, actually, since it turns out that he's only been away on holiday. He also has an alibi, one so iron-clad that Wallander has no choice but to write him off as a suspect. And so, what had seemed simple becomes complex and murky. Moreover, the international ramifications of the case just won't quit. Unexpectedly and uncomfortably, Wallander finds himself locked into an unsettling competition with the apartheid South Africa's secret policethe story is set in 1993and also pitted against an ex-KGB agent. Wallander personifies the charmingly melancholy Scandinavian of lore and tradition. But 560 pages of this would hobble the pace, and dim the charisma, of just about any protagonist. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Not bad but rambling
This third novel in the Inspector Kurt Wallender series is much thicker than the three others I've read, and I'm of two minds about it. It starts off the way you would expect from a procedural: A female real estate agent is cold-bloodedly killed with a bullet through the head, and for no reason Wallender or his colleagues can figure out. While they're investigating the apparent scene of the crime (they haven't actually turned up the body yet), a nearby house explodes. Then they discover the severed index finger of a black man. Naturally, all these odd clues confuse the hell out of everyone. But then the focus shifts to South Africa in the present day -- 1993, that is, with Nelson Mandella newly released from prison and President De Klerk pushing for free election that will certainly mean the end of apartheid -- and for the first time in the series, Wallender is no longer the P.O.V. character. It's a bit unsettling. Maybe half the book deals with events in Sweden, with the Inspector chasing a thoroughly nasty ex-KGB officer working for a group of highly-placed Boer conspirators. The other half is a largely political thriller (with a strong flavor of Forsyth's _Day of the Jackal_) set in Johannesburg and Pretoria. There's lots of fascinating stuff about South Africa, and Mankell (who, apparently between the last book and this one, moved to Mozambique) seems to know his stuff. And the characters he draws are chilling in their lack of concern for human life -- while Wallender, the cop, is pushed to the brink of a nervous breakdown when he has to shoot someone. Nevertheless, the book is structurally schizophrenic; I wonder if it shouldn't have been written as a completely separate and independent novel, outside the Wallender series. Still, it's generally an exciting and eye-opening yarn, even if it's not what one would expect.

One of the best mysteries I've ever read
A new acquaintance was kind enough to mail me a copy of Faceless Killers, Mankell's first Kurt Wallander novel and I have been addicted ever since. The White Lioness is the most compelling of them all. Mankell's Detective Kurt Wallander is excellent company. The plots are interesting but the settings and characters are what haunt my nights and keep me reading long after a more temperate person would have turned off the light. Wallander's interior life is laid bare as he struggles with senseless murders, the frustrations of puzzling through complex homicide investigations, and his own shrinking personal life. The Swedish countryside and an isolated village in Africa become vivid background for a plot that twists and turns through the end. One caveat: this novel is dangerous to personal productivity.

Derivative and Rambling
This is the third Kurt Wallander book, and it regrettably marks the series' continued decline in quality since Mankell's promising debut. The first book (Faceless Killers) was a solid police procedural, while the second (The Dogs of Riga) threw the provincial detective inspector into a wildly improbable espionage tale. This next book strays even further from Mankell's strengths and the result is a rather lame and entirely too long attempt at shoehorning Wallander into an international thriller. The story starts promisingly enough-in the opening chapter the reader is shown the seemingly random murder of a real estate agent in southern Sweden. The next 100 pages are quality police procedural stuff, as Wallander leads the hunt for the missing woman. It's a good puzzle, as he pokes into her apparently spotless life and tries to reconstruct her final movements. Then the book takes a U-turn as the story moves to South Africa. It's 1992, Nelson Mandela has recently been released from jail and President de Klerk is trying to steer the country to some kind of peaceful post-apartheid political arrangement. The next 100 pages detail how a secret committee of powerful right-wing racists led by an intelligence operative seek to derail the process -- and have decided to have Mandela assassinated. Rather improbably they complicate matters by having their South African hitman smuggled into Sweden to be trained by an ex-KGB operative. The rationale for this convoluted scheme doesn't really make any sense, and its only purpose is to serve as a flimsy way to link Sweden and Wallander to the story.

Things move along back in southern Sweden, as the woman's body is found and the missing persons case turns into a murder investigation. The procedural aspects are handled as ably as ever, although three books into the series, Wallander's colleagues are still flat, unexplored characters. With the discovery of a powerful radio transmitter, a rare handgun specific to South Africa, and the severed finger of a black man, you'd expect the investigation to become a little more intensive. However, mostly Wallander muses on how odd it all is. As in the last book, once he does get on the trail of the killer (Mankell does this very clumsily, as Wallander is given the ex-KGB agent's name by a bartender who would have no logical reason to know it), he does all manner of improbable stuff. It's appears to be a trademark of the series that just when Wallander's on exactly the right track, he goes home to drink or sleep instead of calling in a raid or picking suspects for interrogation, thus allowing them just enough time to escape. One of the major failings of the series that Wallander is alternately persistent or lazy, depending on what the plot calls for. In any event, while Wallander and the ex-KGB man chase each other back and forth across the Swedish hinterland, another investigation is taking place in South Africa where two loyal government agents unravel the plot from the other end.

In the end, it's all too obvious that Mankell has read Frederick Forsyth's classic thriller The Day of the Jackal, because the similarities are striking: A secret committee plans the assassination of a world leader in order to thwart political change that will do away with their privileged status. A cold-blooded hitman is contracted with. The killing will be done via high-powered sniper rifle. Intrepid investigators will race against time to uncover the plot. Even the ending is the same, in Forsyth's book the police race up stairs just in the nick of time, here the police race up a hillside just in the nick of time. Mankell's version of all this just isn't very compelling. It doesn't help that the book is cluttered with rather insipid lengthy digressions into the psyche of various characters and cheesy expositions on Africa. For example, we learn all about the importance of the "spirit world" for the hitman. More problematically, the reader is told that apartheid is to blame for his becoming a cold-blooded killer. The entire book is overly ambitious, and whenever we leave Wallander and his investigation, it doesn't work. With this book, and to a lesser extent the previous one, it's clear that Mankell's attempts to combine contemporary world affairs with the life of a depressed provincial cop just doesn't work. Fortunately, the next in the series (Sidetracked) stays at home.