Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by marissalikestoread
The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell
4.0
Mankell generally writes about Swedish crimes in order to highlight social issues overseas. Here the focus is on Chinese slave labor during the building of the trasnscontinental railway and China's expansion into Africa in the modern day. To be sure, I learned a lot about these situations.
On the other hand, the writing (or perhaps the translation?) here is distinctly non-energetic. A story that ought to be a thriller raises the reader's pulse only slightly. Even a John Grisham plot would put me to sleep with sentences like this: "According to Birgitta Roslin's colleagues, Hans Mattsson, who could hardly be called bellicose by nature, had not been sufficiently outspoken in making clear the hopeless situation the courts had been placed in by the National Judiciary Administration and more especially the government, which were intent on saving money." By the time the penny has dropped (the penny always drops near the end of a Swedish mystery, when everything becomes clear to the person solving the crime), the reader has waded through more than 350 pages of this kind of prose.
On the other hand, the writing (or perhaps the translation?) here is distinctly non-energetic. A story that ought to be a thriller raises the reader's pulse only slightly. Even a John Grisham plot would put me to sleep with sentences like this: "According to Birgitta Roslin's colleagues, Hans Mattsson, who could hardly be called bellicose by nature, had not been sufficiently outspoken in making clear the hopeless situation the courts had been placed in by the National Judiciary Administration and more especially the government, which were intent on saving money." By the time the penny has dropped (the penny always drops near the end of a Swedish mystery, when everything becomes clear to the person solving the crime), the reader has waded through more than 350 pages of this kind of prose.