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Title: The White Lioness by Henning Mankell ISBN: 1-4000-3155-9 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 May, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.11 (9 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Change of scenery
Comment: Reading a thriller written by a swedish author is a new experience to me. Mankell is a talented writer who praises his plots above everything, even above character development and book edition. Some pretty clear mistakes, like a totally wrong-placed first chapter and too many coincidences that help the main character, have to be forgiven so that the reader can fully enjoy "The white lioness".
Sweden and South Africa are linked by a white-supremacy conspiracy that intends to train in Scandinavia a black killer whose mission is to kill one of the two most important men in the african country: De Klerk and Mandela. The book is mainly divided between scenes in Sweden and South Africa. The ones in Sweden are a little too slow, and the reader has to pay full attention to remain interested in the story. The parts in South Africa are more interesting.
The main character, swedish inspector Kurt Wallander, is an anti-hero: low-profile, coward, has bad-relationship with his father and daughter. Yet, he's very likable. The reader unwillingly takes Wallander side on the story, even when he does everything wrong. That's his power. Many other characters are part of the plot, some of them more interesting than others. The ending is a little too rushed, and in my opinion could be more developed. This is a very straight and correct book. Mankell doesn't risk too much concerning his writing style.
I understand Mankell has already written several other books featuring Inspector Wallander, and "The white lioness" is only the second one. Also, Mankell was previously known for his children books and his theater plays. I'm pretty sure that his plots and characters show much improvement in more recent books, but nonetheless this one is a preety good way to get to know Henning Mankell.
Grade 8.0/10
Rating: 5
Summary: An entertaining read from an excellent author
Comment: Henning Mankell writes excellent mysteries, and this is no exception. The main character Kurt Wallender comes across as an authentic, flawed character who is all-too-human. Unlike the lone wolf Philip Marlowe in Chandler's books, Wallender is a detective who is also a divorced father, a son, and a man with middle-age challenges. Mankell does an excellent job of balancing the rational pursuit of evidence found in polic procedurals with Wallender's intuition. Moreover, while many of the events themselves are violent, Mankell avoids over-the-top graphic descriptions of violence, unlike some contemporary works (Lehane's Darkness, Take My Hand or Ellroy's Black Dahlia come to mind). This, along with other Mankell books like One Step Behind and Firewall, are excellent and entertaining reads.
Rating: 4
Summary: Gripping but a little far-fetched
Comment: In fact it's gripping enough that it's possible to ignore much of the time that one's credulity is being strained. The first chapter has to be one of the great stereotype-busting moments in all crime fiction, featuring as it does Louise Akerblom, an estate agent of near-saintly honesty and goodness. Sadly, however, she doesn't last long as Russian psycho Konovalenko, the bad guy's bad guy, suddenly appears to blow her brains out on p. 9.
Along comes Inspector Wallander who is, at the outset, at a loss to make sense of this apparently quite pointless murder of a greatly loved young woman. But, slowly and tenaciously, he starts to dig and dig, moving ever closer to the discovery that Akerblom was killed for stumbling upon the activities of the agents of a fiendish South- African plot by highly placed Afrikers of far right political affiliation to derail the de Klerk-Mandela talks with a act of political assassination that will plunge their country into a bloodbath of racial violence, thereby wiping out any further possibility of a peaceful and negotiated end to Apartheid.
The story is told from two ends, Swedish and South African, and from the multiple perspectives of, inter alia, Victor Mabasha, the contract killer Konovalenko is training to carry out the assassination, of Jan Kleyn, the arch plotter, of Pieter van Heerden and Georg Scheepers the South Africans investigating the plotters on behalf of de Klerk, of de Klerk and Mandela themselves, but of course above all from the perspective of Wallander himself, increasingly obsessed and, as the story unfolds, ever closer to breakdown. Part of his problem may be that he has to get through the whole story without any love interest to sustain him, though his complex relationships with his father and daughter and his old friend Sten Widen sustain at least the reader.
The Swedish end of the story starts out as a rather satisfying mystery before turning halfway through into a slightly less satisfying thriller as Wallender and Konovalenko play cat and mouse. It is certainly gripping, page-turning stuff but one cannot help feeling, with Wallander's colleague Svedberg (on p. 337), that: "It was all too much for a little police district like Ystad."
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Title: Sidetracked by Henning Mankell ISBN: 1400031567 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 13 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell ISBN: 1400031575 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 14 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Firewall by Henning Mankell ISBN: 1400031532 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: One Step Behind by Henning Mankell ISBN: 1400031516 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 14 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Dogs of Riga: A Kurt Wallendar Mystery by Henning Mankell, Laurie Thompson ISBN: 1565847873 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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