While this is a crime novel it is also a wide-ranging and ambitious book, connecting events in Sweden with the neo-colonialist activity of the Chinese in Africa. The starting point is a series of murders all occurring in the same night in a remote Swedish village. The local police believe that the murderer was a deranged Swedish man who commits suicide while in custody. However a visiting judge, Birgitta Roslin, who has connections with some of the victims, comes to the view that the murders wer...

Despite a bloody gore fest kicking off the action and a story that spans from 19th century America to present day China, Sweden, Africa and England, this ended up being about as interesting as a lecture on geopolitics from a semi-bright junior high student.This book begins with the discovery of a massacre of almost the entire population of a tiny village in a remote area of Sweden. 19 people have been sliced and diced in various ways. Even the pets have been brutally killed. (Hey, Sweden. WTF? S...

This book starts out with a mass murder in a tiny Swedish village. But it would be a mistake to expect a Swedish mystery here (this expectation lead imho to the various low ratings).When you read on you get the impression that you are reading an historical novel. You also could get the impression of reading a sociocritical social novel.But in my eyes this book is mostly a political thriller containing an abundance of information mostly about China and Africa.Henning Mankell made Mozambique his s...

I cannot over-emphasize how disappinting this book was. It started out great: nearly everyone in a small village in cold and snowy northern Sweden is massacred, a hideous scene. A woman deputy is introduced, then a woman with a connection to some of the victims. Then Mankell takes us back to a the American West, where some Chinese immigrants find themselves serving as slave laborers on the continental railroad. I was fully engrossed.But I don’t think Mankell really thought through where he wante...

OK, to me Henning Mankell's books are always full of life experience, depth, and knowledge of human society. His stories often travel to far away places and intertwine that at times one couldn't possibly imagine they might be related. But just like a butterfly in South America might trigger a tsunami 1000 miles further north, the Man from Beijing does something similar. He causes death and grief in a far away country over something that happened elsewhere and more specific, in another era. And a...

I've heard a lot about Henning Mankell from others that know I am an aficionado of Nordic mysteries, so I was excited when a friend passed this along for me to read. My enthusiasm was premature. If I was to use this book to pass my final judgement on Mankell as an author, I'm afraid I would be rather harsh. There were hints through this book of the thriller that could have been -- compelling, fast-paced, filled with interesting characters -- but these are drowned in extended polemics about the h...

This novel did not live up to its very ambitious premise. Mankell seems to have set out to spin a mystery that swept across continents and generations, and that created connections between the most unconnected of individuals. His ambition far exceeded his execution, making me wonder if this is yet another example of publishing houses rushing books to print without taking the time to properly foster and edit them. This read more like a draft -- albeit a late draft -- than a completed novel. There...

This is one of the worst books I've ever read. Maybe I should back up and say that I don't like crime fiction and that the only reason I read this book is that it was given to me as a gift from my in-laws (who I now respect less for recommending this garbage. I kid. Sort of). Internationally bestselling novelist? This is a joke, right? The author is in serious need of a thesaurus because you can only read the same descriptive phrase so many times in a single page, let alone paragraph (perhaps th...

It's not exactly 3 stars, maybe a little bit more. Are we EVER going to get the extra 1/2 star ability? The opening scenes of this book are positively chilling, when at first a hungry wolf, away from its pack, is searching for food around the tiny village of Hesjövallen and chances upon a human leg. Then later, a researcher looking into the phenomenon of small towns and villages that are simply dying out stumbles upon the scene of a massacre -- with the exception of three people, everyone person...

Henning Mankell is a bad writer. This can be overlooked in books like Faceless Killers and The Man Who Smiled, where plot and character are everything and the dyspeptic charms of Inspector Wallander, coupled with Sweden's gloomy weather, delight us. The Man From Beijing lacks Wallander and lots of other things. The dialogue could not be any more wooden. Here's a Chinese woman telling the protagonist, Swedish judge Birgitta Roslin, that the West is not happy that China was so advanced at one time...

Read all my reviews on http://urlphantomhive.booklikes.com When I was going through some of the reviews, it almost seemed like everyone was disappointed by The Man From Beijing, but this was not at all the memory I had about the book. Yes, it is slow paced, and not all the jumps may make a lot of sense, but I still remember it as an interesting story, after the mass murder on the first few pages. Although even I have to admit that the Wallander series stands out.Side note: I was once able to pa

Henning is back to his true form in this one, even if the premise stretches credulity just a bit. Can't elaborate on that too much without doing a spoiler alert, but suffice to say that the root cause of a mass murder in a tiny Swedish village requires a pathological thirst for revenge that is hard to make fit with the man behind it, given everything he has to lose.But it gives Mankell a great opportunity to explore Chinese history, and particularly the story of two brothers who are driven by po...

There is no question that China has become an economic powerhouse. The question is, is it a communist country, a capitalist country or both? This book looks at those in China who who want China to adhere to the principals of Chairman Mao and place the well being of the masses above all else and those in China who have become capitalists and are hell bent on amassing wealth no matter what the cost.All of this is played out starting with a massacre in a small Swedish town that makes no sense and b...

I have to point out at the outset that I can’t really write a proper review of this book without including a few spoilers, so if you haven’t read it yet, maybe it would be best to leave this review until after you have.I have read several of Mankell’s Wallander books and am currently working my way through the series, thoroughly enjoying them as I go. The blurb for The Man from Beijing sounded fascinating so I decided to give Wallander a break and read this latest standalone novel. I finished it...

It is possible to like a book and be disappointed with it at the same time. That's the way I feel about The Man From Beijing.The parts that work best are those when one character is being stalked by another, especially when Hong Qiu suspects that her psychopathic brother Ya Ru plans to kill her, and when the main character, Birgitta Roslin, realizes the killer is now coming for her. The mood in both sections is pretty creepy.So the story has appeal (assuming you like the genre). But now for the

I was disappointed in this book. It's like Mr. Mankell suddenly decided to write something about China politics, and had to fabricate a plot to support his subject. The plot is disjointed, and the few loosely connected acts of violence do little to support it. The protagonist, a female Swedish judge, has the requisite existential angst seemingly required in Swedish detective novels, but floats in a cloud of vague dread and foreboding throughout most of the book. She's aware something is wrong,

I set a goal of reading 75 books this year (2016) and with 33 minutes left in the year, I did it (woot woot)! First of all, I know the reviews of this Mankell novel are all over the place. But you cannot deny the fact that the man can tell a riveting, engaging tale, spanning several seemingly disjointed settings. This one had a beginning like gangbusters (a small village in northern Sweden experiences 19 murders in the same night), slowed down dramatically as the plot moved from Sweden to China

A book that starts so promisingly and ends with a whimper! This book is a classic case of authoritis -the kind of syndrome where authors decide they must give 10023 of their opinions on world matters into one book. From a sleepy village in Sweden, Mankell just jets around the world, leaning into global matters of China's rise, the Communist Party (who cares when there are 19 dead bodies in Sweden??), some bizarre family drama, and a lot of posturing on colonization.This book had the vague feelin...