Ystad, Sweden, fall 1997. Two teenage girls brutally murder a taxi driver. Although they are quickly apprehended, one of them escapes police custody and disappears without a trace. A few days later, a man stops at an ATM during his evening walk and suddenly falls dead to the ground. Shortly thereafter, a blackout cuts power to a large swath of southern Sweden. When a serviceman arrives at the malfunctioning power substation, he makes a grisly discovery.
Inspector Kurt Wallander begins to sense a connection between all of these events and, at the same time, becomes increasingly aware of the vulnerability of our digitized society.
From Publishers Weekly
In the sixth Kurt Wallander book to appear in English (One Step Behind, etc.), Mankell proves once again that spending time with a glum police inspector in chilly Sweden can be quite thrilling. In the small town of Ystad, a pair of seemingly random events take place within a matter of days: two teenage girls with no apparent motive brutally beat and stab a taxi driver to death, and a remarkably healthy man checks his bank balance at an ATM and then collapses dead on the sidewalk. After two more odd murders, Wallander becomes convinced that the incidents are all connected. The recurring clues demonstrating the vulnerability of society in the electronic age remain just outside of the Luddite inspector's understanding. But once he detects a conspiracy to collapse the world's financial infrastructure on a specific date, Wallander, whose position at work is already imperiled, ignores office politics and protocol to stop the would-be revolutionary. Although Wallander and his investigative team are forced to work at a dizzying speed, the pace of the book is just right, doling out new leads and intrigues right when they're needed. The only shortcoming in this otherwise smartly written mystery is that too many of the most perplexing clues discovered by Wallander are dismissed as red herrings or coincidence. Overall, however, Mankell's ambitious endeavor to combine large themes with small-town murder is a notable success.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Exquisite. -- Los Angeles Times Book Review
Mankell's Inspector Wallander has established himself as one of the best of recent detectives. -- _The Times Literary Supplement [London]
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_Remember Kurt Wallander. --_Booklist starred review
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Wonderful! Police procedural with personal texture. --The Associated Press