The White Lioness: A Mystery (Kurt Wallander Mysteries) Review

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The White Lioness: A Mystery (Kurt Wallander Mysteries) ReviewThis 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.The White Lioness: A Mystery (Kurt Wallander Mysteries) Overview

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