The Man From Beijing by Henning Mankell

Mankell is a Swedish author, and this has been translated to English. He’s a fairly prolific writer who I had not heard about before. I think I stumbled onto this murder mystery through an Amazon or New York Times recommendation. The author starts with a lone wolf wandering across the northern tundra from Norway to Sweden, always in the search of food, and the wolf comes across the body of a man that has recently been killed, one of the 19. The use of the wolf was an effective means of describing the austere desolation of the countryside of the tiny hamlet in northern Sweden where the murders have occurred. A woman detective, Vivi Sundland, becomes the primary investigator. As the murders are publicized, a woman judge, Birgitta Roslin, discovers that her mother’s foster parents, then in their 90s, are among those who were killed. She then begins her own investigation that is hardly parallel to Sundland’s efforts. Roslin finds a link to some mass murders that had just happened in Nevada, and that eventually takes her to China where laborers had been kidnapped to work on the formation of railroads across the U.S. in the 19^th century. The plot occurs across Europe, China, the U.S., Zambia, and Mozambique. The man from Beijing, Ya Ru, is not introduced until well into the book, and he is a classic psychopath, although a brilliant one. He is set on the revenge of his ancestors who were humiliated at the hands of the Swede who had been chosen to run railroad construction crews. One of Ya Ru’s main foils, his sister, Hong Qiu (every time I read her name, I could not help saying “honkie”) is an important figure. Unlike so many murder mysteries, most of the man characters in this book were women. Mankell used this format to write a treatise on the workings of the inner politics of China and its expected future colonization of Africa. I had a little trouble getting into this at the beginning, probably because the books is largely a narrative and not one that is carried by dialogue, as is the case with so many of the books we read. You should know that Mankell has a series of mysteries with the main character of Kurt Wallander, and he has written a number of other books as well. I’m going to read him again, and I recommend him.

West Coast Don