Have you ever been to Latvia?Me neither. Turns out Riga is the capital of this Baltic state. Back in the olden days of 1991 and thereabouts, this evil empire called the Soviet Union (once and again called Russia – home of the Rooskies) controlled a big chunk of the globe, especially the cold wintry parts.Including Riga, Latvia. (**I was happily showed otherwise when I first posted this review, check out the comments below and the friendly reader from sunny and warm Riga)Another cold and dark pla...

Poor old Kurt Wallander. I just want to buy the guy a beer and tell him to quit being so hard on himself. The Swedish police detective isn’t faring much better in the second book of the series than he was in the first. Still lonely after his divorce and worried about his flighty daughter and elderly father, Wallander has also lost his best friend on the police force to cancer. The new breed of crime rising in the early ‘90s in Sweden continues to shock him and makes him uncertain whether he shou...

I gave this three stars and that seems to be about right, though I will read more in this series featuring everyday provincial Swedish detective Kurt Wallender, a kind of dour and dumpy but somehow likeable guy. He's Detective Everyman--middle-aged, just dumped by his wife, estranged for his flighty daughter, his fave partner dead from cancer, feeling guilty about not spending enough time with his father who is descending in dementia. as a detective, he's not Sherlock Holmes. He doesn't have the...

Kurt Wallander, Swedish detective, is inexplicably sent to Latvia to investigate the death of a Latvian police officer who was killed ...in Latvia.Wallander doesn't know why he's in Latvia. Henning Mankell doesn't appear to know why Wallander is in Latvia. I don't know why Wallander is in Latvia. After 300 pages of Wallander being driven around Latvia, being cold, eating omelettes, drinking coffee, wandering around with a map, and sitting around asking himself why he's in Latvia, I don't actuall...

Updated reviewI read the first book in the Wallander series back in 2016. Funnily enough, I read it for that year's Festive Season task. The second book in the series did not do much for me either. Sweden is still a hot bed of racism IMHO and we have Wallander still flailing about with regards to his relationship with his father, ex, and daughter. The investigation should have been interesting, but honestly it was not. The first half of the book was painful to get through. I do wish that there w...

Once upon a time I heard tell of a poet who always travelled with the same three books: the Bible, Don Quixote and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It was probably a symbolist poet now that I come to think of it (view spoiler)[ perhaps it was Alexander Blok, or Andrei Bely or just somebody like that (hide spoiler)]. Although I approve of travelling with a book or two - I'll admit to being a bigamist reader - as a rule I prefer a little more variety even if this does require prolonged dithering in...

Book ReviewDogs of Riga, the second in the Kurt Wallander series places Wallander outside of his comfort zone: in Riga, capital of Latvia and without the presence of his familiar Swedish colleagues to whom we were introduced in the first of the series.Riga, LatviaAn oft rendered opinion of Americans by Europeans is that the average European appears to know more about American politics than does the average American. And so it is with slight amusement that I find Wallander cast adrift in the same...

Swedish detective Kurt Wallander is plunged into another depressing mystery when two bodies wash ashore on the Swedish coast in a life raft. The two male victims have been shot to death and then wrapped in an embrace in the lifeboat and cast adrift. They are carrying no identification, but their dental work suggests that they are from somewhere in Eastern Europe.The victims are finally traced to Latvia and a police official from Riga named Major Liepa comes to Sweden to participate in the invest...

This second Kurt Wallander book was surpsingly different from the first. My dissapointment after what I thought was the start of a very promising police procedural series makes me rate this lower than the book probably deserves.I was expecting another gloomy, realistic rendering of a murder case, and the first chapters offered me just that : a mysterious boat is found in the Baltic with two unidentified corpses in it. Wallander tries to unravel the mystery, but he has a hard time because there a...

This was an engaging mystery, with two dead bodies found drifting in an inflatable raft in the ocean and Wallander his usual charming glum self, until the setting moved from Sweden to Latvia. I just couldn't get interested in the shadowy, dangerous, corrupt, gray, Soviet-controlled landscape the way Mankell had written it. And my image of a woman who would have the name Baiba Liepa is a fat housewife wearing a babushka, simmering pigs feet in a big cauldron in her yard next to her Lada up on cin...

You may have gathered from my other reviews (such as here and here) that the Scandinoir tsunami has broken on either side of me and left me largely unmoved. I'm tired of protagonists who are incompetent at the business of being human beings and stories full of characters who are all broken doves. So it could be that my reaction to The Dogs of Riga -- author Mankell's second Wallander novel -- is one of relief in finding an entry in this genre that didn't make me want to open a vein.Inspector Kur...

Initially I was 3 stars out of loyalty for the series, and because compared to some of the 2s I've awarded, at least Dogs of Riga is a stylistically painless read. But the bad news is that the whole story is utterly implausible - irritatingly so.Shortly after the initial discovery of the bodies it is absolutely clear that the murders weren't committed in his jurisdiction, let alone his country and the victims not Swedish. Nonetheless after the death - not in Sweden - of a non-Swedish detective,

A serviceable read - is that a good way to put it? Kind of ordinary, but that's Mankell's writing style: sparse, spare, and kind of ordinary. Lots of detail. Little details. Like drinking coffee, shutting the door, taking a nap, taking a warm bath, taking a cold bath. There are readers who eat this up.I eat it, too, but the same food night after night eventually gets a little dull. On the other hand, I stuck with the book as I wanted to know what was going on! And how would Kurt get out of this