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A review by octavia_cade
The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
3.5
I suppose the solution to having your detective continually stumble upon an increasingly unlikely body count as your series progresses is to take him out of the small town altogether. Take him out of the country, even, and dump him in the middle of a political nightmare in an unstable state. Poor old Wallander is completely out of his depth in Latvia, used as he is to the deeply organised Swedish criminal system, but for someone who knows as little about Latvia as I do, that's a sympathetic problem.
I read the first in this series last week, and I continue to be interested in the very muted presentation of the narrative. The world just seems increasingly incomprehensible to Wallander, a sort of constantly grey effect, everything made nebulous (or worse) by a change he can't keep up with. He's so increasingly disconnected, a sort of constant mix of disappointment and bafflement, that he comes across as surprisingly approachable. I live on the other side of the world from the Nordic states, and this was written decades ago, but I suspect that if I came from that time and place, a lot of this would resonate even more than it's doing now.
I read the first in this series last week, and I continue to be interested in the very muted presentation of the narrative. The world just seems increasingly incomprehensible to Wallander, a sort of constantly grey effect, everything made nebulous (or worse) by a change he can't keep up with. He's so increasingly disconnected, a sort of constant mix of disappointment and bafflement, that he comes across as surprisingly approachable. I live on the other side of the world from the Nordic states, and this was written decades ago, but I suspect that if I came from that time and place, a lot of this would resonate even more than it's doing now.