Sidetracked (Villospår)

⚖The case for it

Kurt Wallander investigates serial murders beginning with a girl's self-immolation in a rapeseed field. Mankell's Wallander books are social autopsies: Sweden's welfare state being hollowed out, racism breaking through the surface of tolerance, good men ground down by bureaucracy and grief. The Guardian named this the best of the series.

— the canon

✕The case against

Wallander's miseries arrive on schedule: the failing father, the distant daughter, the bad diet, the brooding over Sweden's decline delivered as interior monologue every thirty pages. Mankell's social diagnosis is earnest and administered in lectures, the translation's English is flat as a motorway, and underneath sits a standard serial-killer engine, scalps and all, of a kind the genre builds annually.

— the honest librarian