A teenage girl commits suicide by burning herself to death. A serial killer with a taste for gruesome violence and an urge to scalp his victims is on the loose. His first victim is a former minister of justice whose mutilated body is found on the beach in a wealthy neighborhood. Further corpses are soon found. Inspector Kurt Wallander, who has been a horrified witness to the girl's self-immolation, looks for a reason for her despair while also heading the police search for the killer. Links between the deaths prove elusive but Wallander's melancholy determination to do his job eventually leads him towards the truth.

Like Mankell's other Wallander novels, this is not a conventional mystery story. Readers know the identity of the killer well before the book’s conclusion. The emphasis is not on a puzzle that needs to be worked out but on character and on the contradictions and corruption of the Swedish society in which Wallander lives. The Sweden Mankell describes is a country where the welfare-state idealism of the past has turned sour and the values of tolerance and social inclusiveness are under constant threat. Racism and violence lurk beneath the thin veneer of civilized society. Wallander, confronted by daily horrors in his job and faced by personal and family difficulties, struggles to maintain his own decency and honesty. Often haunted by the crimes he is investigating (in Sidetracked the image of the girl burning enters his dreams), he is an unglamorous, thoughtful but strangely compelling central character around whom Mankell has constructed some of the most memorable crime novels of recent years. Beginning with Faceless Killers, a story in which the murders of an elderly couple on an isolated farm become the focus of racial tensions, the Wallander novels provide an unforgiving portrait of contemporary society but one which we can all recognize.

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