Product Description

Internationally bestselling novelist Henning Mankell delivers a terrifying thriller inspired by the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

Henning Mankell, the acclaimed author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries, has put his unmistakable stamp on this gripping new thriller. Archaeologist Louise Cantor returns home to Sweden and makes a devastating discovery: her only child, twenty-eight-year-old Henrik, dead in his bed. The police rule his death a suicide but she knows he was murdered; her quest to find out what really happened to Henrik takes her across the globe to Barcelona, where her son kept a secret apartment; Sydney, Australia, to find Aron, her estranged ex-husband and Henrik's father; and to Maputo, Mozambique, where she learns the awful truth behind an AIDS hospice. Her investigation reveals how much her son concealed from her as she uncovers the links between his death, the African AIDS epidemic, and Western pharmaceutical interests, while those who dare help her are killed off.

In the tradition of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener, Kennedy's Brain was inspired by Mankell's anger at ongoing inequities that permit a few people to have unprecedented power over the many poor Africans who have none. Already a bestseller in Europe, Kennedy's Brain is both a thrilling page-turner and a damning indictment of inhuman greed in the face of the African AIDS crisis.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #447092 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781595581846
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
In Mankell's engaging but overly polemical stand-alone crime novel, Louise Cantor, an archeologist working in Greece, returns home to Sweden to discover her grown son, Henrik, lying dead in his own bed. Cantor, who refuses to accept the police theory that Henrik killed himself, launches her own investigation. (The book's title refers to one of the mysteries surrounding the JFK assassination, which had become a bizarre metaphor for the secretive Henrik.) In her quest for answers, Cantor journeys to Australia in search of her estranged husband; to Barcelona, where Henrik had an apartment and a surprisingly large bank account; and to Maputo, Mozambique, where she learns of the devastation wrought by poverty, AIDS and greed. Mankell, author of the wonderful Kurt Wallender series (Faceless Killers, etc.), is a deft and imaginative plotter and an insightful observer of the human condition, but here his righteous anger over the AIDS crisis in Africa and the exploitative role of the pharmaceutical industry overshadows the mystery solving. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Driven by the memory of seeing an African man die of AIDS, Mankell sets aside his Kurt Wallander series to deliver a scathing indictment of how drug companies exploit, and Western nations ignore, that continent's mounting medical horrors. There's nothing metaphorical about the core subject, but Mankell tempers his stridency by wrapping it inside a moving tale of loss. Swedish archaeologist Louise Cantor returns from the Greek dig site she oversees to find her son, Henrik, an apparent suicide. As unreasonable in her grief as any parent who loses a child, Cantor at first refuses to accept even the fact of his death and then sets out to prove he was murdered. The clues are scant—he's found in pajamas when he always slept nude; his computer is missing—but a mother sometimes intuits more than the best police investigator can. As she puzzles over Henrik's seeming obsession with the postautopsy disappearance of JFK's brain—a harbinger of high-level conspiracies and cover-ups—and retraces her son's work with African AIDS patients, Cantor thinks in terms of reassembling pottery shards. But there may be vase breakers afoot willing to do anything to keep her from unearthing the truth. Meanwhile, a question keeps arising: Why is it that "we know all about how Africans die, but hardly anything about how they live?" This is a bracing, worthwhile read. Sennett, Frank

Review
"Masterful…. A deeper sort of procedural, in effect a kind of manual in morality forensics."
—The Denver Post

“A top-notch thriller…has all Mankell's trademarks: fine characters, a complex plot, a moody, expressive style.”
—The Globe & Mail

“A cautionary tale, an exploration of family relationships, a provocative portrayal of grief and an indictment of worldwide ignorance.” —Bookreporter

Customer Reviews

The plight of the Third World
Accomplished master of the police procedural Henning Mankell strays from this genre in his latest novel, "Kennedy's Brain". In his novel, Mankell in the guise of a mystery, has penned what is in reality a social commentary. Mankell who resides at least partially in Mozambique, takes aim at the plight of the African underprivileged particularly relating to the AIDS epidemic and it's exploitation by the pharmaceutical companies.

Swedish archaeologist Louise Cantor whose specialty is ancient Greek artifracts is leading an expedition in Greece sponsored by Uppsala university. She happily anticipates taking a break to return to Stockholm and visit her son Henrik. Much to her shock and dismay she arrives at his flat, unable to raise him on the phone, to find him lying dead in bed. She is stunned to learn that an autopsy confirms that he overdosed on barbiturates.

Unable to believe that Henrik would take his own life she commences her own investigation. She travels across the world to a remote area of Australia to recruit her estranged husband Aron and inform him of their son's death. Together they go through his papers that direct them to an apartment their son kept in Barcelona. Hacking into his computer they discover that he was HIV positive and that he had business that took him to Mozambique.

Louise Cantor proceeds to Africa after the mysterious disappearance of her ex husband. While there she is confronted by danger and the horrors of a village designed to care for AIDS victims where Henrik had worked. She discovers that there is quite a bit more going on there than administering to the sick.

Mankell paints a graphic picture of the misery endured by the suffering in Africa while being critical of those who opportunistically use them for financial gain. The plot of "Kennedy's Brain", metaphor for an inexplicable and secretive mystery is very much similar to Le Carre's "The Constant Gardener".

Puzzled
What's going on here? I give five stars to all the Kurt Wallander novels that have been translated into English, except "The Dogs Of Riga," which bogs down and is, overall, a little tedious. "Kennedy's Brain" proved to be disappointing. The book posits a medical conspiracy which is intent on testing all manner of dubious and/or unapproved AIDS drugs on both healthy and dying Africans. The conspirators seem to have killed everyone around the book's heroine, Louise Cantor, but, for some baffling reason, they leave her alone: Louise's ex-husband, Aron, is killed, two Africans Louise befriends are killed (even though they will shortly be dead from AIDS), and Louise's son, Henrik, is killed. Or maybe not. But Louise is more dangerous to the conspiracy than most of these individuals. After 326 pages, we learn very little about this globe-spanning, destroy-everything-in-its-path conspiracy. Is it run by one (!?!) man, Christian Holloway, who appears to be working alone? And what has John F. Kennedy's brain got to do with anything? Some kind of metaphor? I still look forward to Mr. Mankell's future novels about Kurt Wallander and his daughter, but I might also note that the translator, Laurie Thompson, has done a sloppy job in "Kennedy's Brain." In a number of places, words and sentences don't seem to make sense in context. In the final analysis, "Kennedy's Brain" only tells a story on the periphery of the story I wish it had told.

What is Real?
Henning Mankell has written 37 novels, with perhaps the nine Kurt Wallender mysteries best known in the United States. The present novel, while a mystery of sorts, really is a polemic based on the author's frustration with the poverty and disease rampant on the African continent. Indeed, it is a written indictment of the greed which is an inherent part of the African AIDS crisis.

Swedish archaeologist Louise Cantor returns home from her job of supervising a Greek dig to find her only son lying in his bed, dead. An autopsy shows the 28-year-old full of sleeping pills, and his death is ruled a suicide. Louise refuses to accept the ruling, believing his death was a murder, and embarks on retracing his various trails to discover the "truth." It takes her to Barcelona, where the son had a secret apartment, to Australia to find her ex-husband, and then to Maputo, Mozambique. Along the way she finds out her sun was HIV positive.

Bit by bit, Louise learns how little she knew about her son. In Mozambique she learns an awful truth about an AIDS hospice, and possibly its link to the son's death. Also, there appear to be links between the AIDS epidemic and Western pharmaceutical interests, giving the author more reason to raise criticism. This book is not a joy to read, despite how well-written it is, but then it is not meant to be. While it is a story full of mysteries, it is not the kind of tale a Wallender novel would be. It is more of a psychological inquiry with social overtones.