The Man From Beijing

In a sleepy hamlet in north Sweden, the local police make a chilling discovery; nineteen people have been brutally slaughtered. It is a crime unprecedented in Sweden's history and the police are under incredible pressure to solve the killings.

When Judge Birgitta Roslin reads about the massacre, she realises that she has a family connection to one of the couples involved and decides to investigate. When the police make a hasty arrest it is left to her to investigate the source of a nineteenth century diary and red silk ribbon found near the crime scene. What she will uncover leads her into an international web of corruption and a story of vengeance that stretches back over a hundred years.

The Man from Beijing is a gripping political thriller and a compelling detective story from a writer at the height of his powers.

Daniel

In 1875 Hans Bengler, a young entomologist, leaves Sweden for the expedition of a lifetime to the Kalahari Desert where he hopes to find a previously undiscovered insect to name after himself and advance his career. Instead, after his long and arduous journey through the sands, he finds a small boy, whose tribe has been decimated by European raiders.

Accustomed to collecting specimens, Bengler decides to adopt the boy and names him Daniel. He takes the traumatised child home with him to Sweden and plans to 'civilise' him. But Daniel cannot slip into an alien culture, and a new life in the cold and snow, so easily. He yearns desperately for the desert and his real family, who visit him in his dreams. His only consolation comes from his friendship with a vulnerable young girl called Sanna, who is also an outsider in her community. But even this bond is destined to be violently broken, as Daniel's isolation and increasing desperation lead to a chilling tragedy.

Hans Olofson is the son of a Swedish lumberjack. His childhood was unsettled: an alcoholic father, and a mother disappeared, only alive in old photographs. His adolescence was no easier as he lost both his best friend and his lover tragically. Alone and adrift, as a young man his only desire is to fulfil his lover’s dream and visit the grave of a legendary missionary who survived alone in the remote hills of Northern Zambia.

On reaching Africa, Olofson is struck by its beauty and mystery. After fulfilling his initial quest, an opportunity of employment in the region tempts him to stay. Time passes quickly. Though dismayed by the attitude of the white population to their adopted country, which is compounded by their vulnerability to alcohol and malaria, he is interested enough to take up sole responsibility for the farm he manages. For almost two decades Hans Olofson battles with a hostile environment and a placid, but resistant workforce.

Set in the 1970s and 1980s, The Eye of the Leopard explores the relationship between the white farmers and their native workers. Through Olofson’s descent into near mental collapse it becomes clear that many years spent in a foreign land do not necessarily breed an understanding of its people: a handful of generations of white settlers cannot change a continent underpinned by myth and superstition. The Eye of the Leopard is a first-rate and original psychological thriller delving deep into the mind of a man lost in an unknown world.

When archaeologist Louise Cantor’s son Henrik is found dead in his flat, she refuses to believe it was suicide. Clues that only a mother could detect lead her to believe something more sinister took place.

Henrik had kept many things back from her and she is shocked to learn he had contracted HIV. While looking through his bundles of papers, she discovers he was obsessed with the conspiracy theory that JFK’s brain disappeared prior to the autopsy – along with the vital evidence regarding bullet exit wounds. The only lead is a letter and photograph from Henrik’s girlfriend in Mozambique.

Louise’s quest to unravel the mystery surrounding her son’s death takes her to Africa; a continent rife with disease, poverty and corruption. Struggling to cope with sickness and the oppressive heat, Louise sees fear in every face, even unexpectedly in the patients at the clinics set up by an American businessman. In Kennedy’s Brain Mankell confirms his status as a master of suspense, and delivers a timely and riveting thriller which will have readers on the edge of their seats until the very end.

October 1914: the destroyer Svea emerged from the Stockholm archipelago bearing south-south-east. On board was Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, a naval engineer charged with making depth soundings to find a navigable channel for the Swedish navy. As a child Tobiasson-Svartman was fascinated by measurement; nothing is as magical as exact knowledge. His instinct for his profession is reflected in the comfortable domesticity he enjoys with his wife - herself meticulous in every detail.

Close to the waters where soundings are taken Tobiasson-Svartman alights on a barren skerry, presumed uninhabited, and is surprised to discover there a young woman, Sara Fredrika. Despite her almost feral appearance, something about her strikes him to the core. The mission is a success and the Svea returns to Gothenburg. Tobiasson-Svartman, however, remains haunted by this chance encounter; his equilibrium has been disturbed, and he is now compelled to find any pretence to return to the remote islet.

In Depths Mankell confirms his status as a writer beyond the crime genre. By delving deep into the male psyche, he has produced a novel both as tense and compelling in every way as the Wallander series, but also powerful, moving and ultimately tragic.

Chronicler of the Winds

One night José Antonio Maria Vaz hears gunfire from the deserted theatre next door to his bakery. He races to the theatre's uppermost gallery, and there beneath him on a spotlit stage lies the wounded body of Nelio, a street urchin renowned for living on his wits. Gasping, the wounded boy asks to be taken to the roof to breathe the beautiful air fresh off the Indian Ocean. On that theatre roof, his life ebbing away, Nelio begins his story.

At the age of five, Nelio watched helplessly as his village was burned to the ground and his people were massacred by bandits. He escaped by chance; a man handed him a gun and ordered him to shoot another boy, but instead he turned the gun on the bandit and ran. He made his way to the coast, encountering en route bizarre characters who gave him guidance. Upon arrival in the city Nelio joined a rough street gang, and began a very different way of life.

Henning Mankell's Chronicler of the Winds is a dazzling new venture from the master of crime; a beautifully told fable of the African continent.

A few days later what they have been warned of comes to pass: a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead.The dead men were Eastern European criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit. But what appears in Sweden to be an open-and-shut case soon takes on a far more sinister aspect. Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea to Riga in Latvia, a nation experiencing the massive social and political upheaval that will lead to its independence from the Soviet Union. There Wallander is plunged into a frozen, alien world of police surveillance, scarcely veiled threats, and lies. Doomed always to be one step behind the shadowy figures he pursues , he comes to understand what it is to live in a nation in which democracy is still only a dream. Only his dogged, almost subconscious desire to se that justice is done brings the truth to light.