This is my second Wallander novel and I'm really enjoying them. This book is really just a much better version of "Faceless Killers". Wallander struggles with his problems with greater depth, and I really enjoyed the way the father was used to illustrate these struggles. As for the crime fighting, It's stoic and exact, like the books, and it has a feel that is honest but at the same time enjoyable.

The earlier Henning Mankell novels all have the Wallander character as strong with good leadership abilities - unlike the later books when Wallander was ill and it reflected in his work. The Fifth Woman (the 6th Wallander novel) has Wallander dealing with a multiple murder case - three murders discovered in or near Wallander's small town in Sweden. He brings his small group of detectives together and leads them through a very complex, brutal and confusing case - a case where none of the detectives think they will ever solve it. All three murders are very brutal and beyond what is usually deemed acceptable in Sweden. Wallander as a character is always challenged by his personal life and this book isn't any different. But Wallander is a detective and a good one - the search for the killer becomes his main focus. The Swedish weather throughout the book is rainy or cold and windy - it gets a little depressing but it makes the story that more intense. You'll stumble, of course, over the Swedish names but the intensity of the story will keep you riveted.

This is the sixth in the series of novels based on Kurt Wallander, an inspector with the Swedish Police based in the relatively small town of Ystad. In this book a woman starts killing men who are connected only by the fact that they have murdered or abused women. She has been documenting such cases for several years but it is the murder of her own mother while travelling in Africa which triggers her acts of revenge. The plot is complex but well worked out. As is often in the case in Wallander novels the author is particularly good at portraying investigative teamwork. I have not read any author who does this better.

Quite often in these novels disquiet is expressed about the state of contemporary Sweden. Of the books I have read this title articulates these concerns most clearly so I will state that the book has considerable merits as a crime novel and deal with this issue. Quotations and page numbers refer to the Vintage paperback, English translation by Steven T Murray, which reads very well.

Here, Kurt Wallander is musing on what he sees as a decline.
‘The Sweden that was his, the country he had grown up in, that was built after the war, was not as solid as they had thought. Under the surface was quagmire. Even back then the high-rise buildings that had been erected were described as “inhuman”. How could people who lived there be expected to keep their “humanity”? Society had grown cruel. People who felt they were unwanted or unwelcome in their own country reacted with aggression. There was no such thing as meaningless violence. Every violent act had a meaning for the person who committed it. Only when you dared accept this truth could you hope to turn society in another direction.’ (page 228)

The statement that every violent act has a meaning for the person who commits is contentious. For example, violence fueled by drink and/or drugs may have little or no meaning except for the victim. Nonetheless, there may well be some general truth in it. At no point does Wallander consider any mechanism by which society might be turned in another direction, which is probably just as well.

While discussing this subject with his daughter Linda, he uses socks as a way in. The quotation contains small omissions indicated by dots.
‘When I was growing up, Sweden was still a country where people darned their socks . . . then suddenly one day it was over. . . no-one bothered to repair them. The whole society changed. “Wear it out and toss it” was the only rule that applied. . . . But then it started to spread, until finally it became a kind of invisible moral code. I think it changed our view of right and wrong, of what you were allowed to do to other people and what you weren’t.’
(page 297)

This passage reminds me of The Amateur Immigrant, by Robert Louis Stevenson, where he points out that economists don’t tell us enough about pies.

Though he is good at it, Wallander finds police work wearing and demoralising. In the following quotation the tape referred to is the tape which marks out a crime scene.
‘His work was little more than a poorly paid test of endurance. He was being paid to endure this. The plastic tape wound through his life like a snake.’ (page 354)

Since this case is complex, additional officers are brought in from Malmö. One of these, Birch, tells Wallander about the views of an old commissioner, now retired.
‘I remember that he used to talk to us younger detectives and warn us that everything was going to get a lot tougher. The violence would get more widespread and more brutal. He said that this was because Sweden’s prosperity was a well-camouflaged quagmire. The decay was underneath it all.’ (page 362)

Since we are dealing with fiction we cannot safely assume that such views coincide with those of the author. But I believe they do.

La tercera es la vencida, por fin lo terminé. Y está buenísimo. Cuando lo compré no sabía que era el sexto libro sobre las historias del policía Kurt Wallander, ahora leeré los libros anteriores porque éste de verdad que me tenía en ascuas cada vez que lo cerraba, muchas veces leer libros de este género se vuelve pesado y terminarlo pronto depende mucho de si estás con ánimos de leer sobre asesinatos y personas locas jajaja pero la historia te atrapa y te intriga (aunque desde el principio sabes quién es el asesino) pero creo que lo importante aquí fue el desarrollo de la investigación criminal, descubrir los porqués, además de que el modo en que se conectan las personas involucradas es impresionante, creo que eso es lo que me mantuvo en espera todo el tiempo porque quería saber POR QUÉ se conocían estas personas cuando aparentemente no tenían nada en común. Ahora, también hay un tema que se toma al principio que fue LA guerra en Argelia, necesito investigar más al respecto. Aunque mucho de esto es ficción, Henning hace que sus personajes desborden humanidad. Creo que es un gran libro, de verdad que ahora mi obsesión por los escritores escandinavos no hará más que crecer, estoy muy ansiosa de descubrir un nuevo libro con clima frío y personajes entrañables. Sólo me arrepiento de no haberlo leído hace más de 4 años que lo compré....

As I get farther into this series ('The Fifth Woman' is the sixth book), I find the serial killers more and more unlikely and harder to see as actual characters. It's as if Mankell created them as progressively challenging exercises in motivation and execution and stopped working on them as people. That's not to say Mankell is not creative and clever (and shocking) in limning those motivations and executions, but I like more realistic villains (as in 'The White Lioness'). He makes up for this as he digs deeper into his detective's history and personality, and his family, his acquaintances and his colleagues. Kurt Wallander is an endlessly intriguing guy, and it's the arc of his life story as he goes from his forties towards his fifties that keeps me going. In 'The Fifth Woman,' women continue to have more and more influence: Wallander's daughter, his Latvian friend Baiba, the new police chief and especially his fellow cop, Ann-Britt Hoglund. It's not giving away too much to note that even the serial killer's a woman in this one.

Poco puedo decir a estas alturas de Mankell y de Wallander, otro librazo, no nos descubre nada nuevo, ni es el mejor libro del mundo, pero hasta la fecha, todos los libros de este autor, son de una sencillez pasmosa. La realidad de la manera más sencilla y corriente me sigue deslumbrando. Son personajes de verdad, sin artificios ni inventos más allá de crear una trama que hile y le de cabida a todo.
Me he hecho un poco de lio con los participantes, no con los polis, pero sí con el resto. Al criminal lo cacé nada más asomó el hocico, pero no le resta nada, al contrario, las circunstancias que rodean los asesinatos están vigentes así como el desarrollo y los pensamientos de Wallander sobre la sociedad... Me queda menos Wallander y menos Mankell... o quizá más.

The best Wallander mystery, IMO!

I read for pleasure almost every day. Most of the time I have several books that I’m working on concurrently. Depending on my mood, I’ll choose one or another. Perhaps I feel like scifi, perhaps erotic romance, perhaps non-fiction. It’s rare that I focus exclusively on one title.

About two weeks ago, while on a business trip, I started reading The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell When I returned home, I found I didn’t really want to pick up anything else, not until I’d finished it. This bleak, brutal mystery is not at all my typical fare, but for some reason, it grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.

The Fifth Woman begins with a letter from Africa. A Swedish woman, a tourist, has been slaughtered in a terrorist attack, along with four nuns. Her embarrassing death has been covered up by the corrupt authorities, but a female investigator has taken the initiative to inform the woman’s daughter. This vicious murder sets the tone of the novel, yet really does not affect the plot, except that it becomes the trigger for the daughter to initiate a long-planned campaign of vengeance.

Mankell starts by showing us the inner life of the serial killer. We don’t know who she is, but we taste her cold hatred for her victims and sense the brittle logic of her insanity. This glimpse into her mind has a compelling intimacy. The author repeats these visits at intervals throughout the book, without revealing the killer’s identity or her underlying motivation. At once both tantalizing and disturbing, they become addictive.

The next chapter adopts the point of view of her first victim. Of course, we don’t know at the start that he’s marked for a cruel and unusual death. Holger Eriksson seems like a reasonable man, in his seventies, a bit solitary, a retired car dealer who now writes poetry and is passionate about birds. Why does he deserve to be impaled on sharpened bamboo stakes at the bottom of a ditch?

Only after we’ve met the murderer and one of the murdered does the narrative shift to the main character, police inspector Kurt Wallander. He has just begun to recover from a horrific case over the summer, tracking down a vicious serial killer. A recent vacation in Rome with his father has given him some new hope for his future. Then Eriksson’s mangled body is discovered and he’s thrown back into the middle of a nightmare.

Wallander is very much an anti-hero. He’s forgetful, disorganized, depressed. He wonders why he continues to serve in the police force when he doesn’t even make enough money to repair his aging car. Yet he has a level of dedication that is both admirable and crazy. He feels responsible not only for solving the crimes, but also for the well-being of his subordinates. As two more men die in ways clearly intended to make them suffer, Wallander struggles to piece together the clues and to understand the killer’s “language”.

One Amazon reviewer criticized this book as boring, with dozens of false leads, exhausting crime scene surveys, interviews that don’t yield results, and fruitless meetings of the investigation team. I believe this repetition to be intentional. The author shows us that police work is neither glamorous nor exciting. It depends on meticulous research and careful logic. At the same time, there’s an intuitive component. Wallander does not dismiss his feelings or his hunches. More often than not, they turn out to be valid.

The Fifth Woman is set in the flat, windswept southern part of Sweden, during the fall and early winter. Vivid descriptions of the harsh landscape contribute to the dark mood of the novel. Wallander’s home town Ystad in autumn is chilly, blustery, and foggy. Night falls early. There are echoes of violence and discontent everywhere, too, the grand social experiment of Sweden not necessarily fulfilling its golden promises.

So this is not a happy novel, though in the end Wallander apprehends the murderer. I’m really quite puzzled as to why I found it so compelling. In fact, I was somewhat disappointed when the killer’s motivation was finally revealed. Her personal experiences seemed insufficiently traumatic to have generated such a lust for revenge.

I guess I kept reading because I did want to understand the killer’s motivation. I wanted to see Wallander figure it out, too. When he does, though, there’s little satisfaction to be found in his success. The cost to him and his team has been high. Meanwhile, he has spent long enough trying to comprehend the murderer that he can’t help feeling some empathy for her.

I have to say, I loved this ambiguity, so different from many mysteries. Ultimately there are no heroes or villains, only human beings trying to survive.

It is definitely a page turner but not as good as previous Wallender novels. The seemingly endless philosophizing about the ills of Swedish society and how everything is expensive could have been omitted. I did like how he said Swedish society was failing because no one could darn socks and then he is sitting beside someone on a plane darning a sock. That was amusing.

The plot of a serial killing woman is good and the suspense kept up throughout. The gruesome murders of deserving victims is imaginative. It is a bit to tidy ending with the murderer. The best bits are the police procedures and the gritty awful Swedish weather helps give atmosphere to the whole story.


One day I will have to watch the tv series. I am reluctant as usually they are done so badly.

خوب بود
بسیار بهتر از دیوار اتش بود چون حداقل معما هایی که طرح میشد رو جواب میداد اونم به‌شکلی که ۲۰ صفحه ی اخر کتاب داشت جمع بندی هارو میکرد که از اونوور بوم افتادن بود نسبت به دیوار اتش .

The Fifth Woman, the sixth book in the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell, seems to me the best and most fully realized novel that I have read in his series thus far. It’s a serial killer book, sigh, but it complicates our view of the actual killings and isn’t just torture for torture’s sake. I’ll try to explain, if I can do so without too many spoilers, but generally we come to sympathize with the killer in some ways when all is revealed. And that implicates us in the violence in some ways that interestingly complicates the story. Can we take the law in our own hands when we feel righteous wrath?

As I have observed with earlier reviews, as I see it Mankell intends to infuse an entertainment genre--detective, thriller, police procedural--with global social issues. In the last book we dealt briefly with sex trafficking, but in this book a range of women’s issues are present throughout. We see a new (female) police chief, we see a young (female) detective of whom the older more traditional males are somewhat jealous. The series takes place in small town, provincial Sweden, which is a country known for a century for its prosperity, tolerance and liberal views of sexuality, but Mankell shows us the ways that Sweden is changing: Less tolerance for refugees, murders of women, racism, and sexism. We who live in small towns or in our heads have to see the world is changing and respond to that, like it or not. Mankell is not a nihlist noir author, he's a humanist.

This book opens with an historical incident, the murder in Africa of four nuns and a fifth woman, a Swedish woman, whose death drives all the crimes committed in the book. Questions about just what it is that women are capable of weave their way through this book: Can women be good detectives? Can they be killers? Are they strong enough ? Do they pack a suitcase differently than men? Do they in general think and act differently than men? And in this (by reputation) tolerant country in 1994, what is the extent of spousal/domestic abuse? If women are victims of crimes, are perpetrators prosecuted? Why do men hurt women, and what does this say about the direction of contemporary society?

There are several brutal crimes in this book that take place mainly against men, actually, with cruel and even seemingly sadistic aspects to them. Why? The book tacks back and forth between Kurt Wallander’s 24/7 intense yet lonely life where he doesn’t abuse people but neglects his family and his would-be lover Byba. He works all the time! He never calls. His first wife left him in part because of these things, and her first husband was also a driven cop; why would Byba agree to marry Wallander? What makes a healthy relationship for cops, or for anyone?

The resolution of this one is troubling but also (somewhat guiltily) satisfying in certain ways. Also one aspect we like is that daughter Linda has expressed interest in becoming a cop! (which if you look at the fact that there is an actual Kurt and Linda Wallander series Mankell wrote, actually happens!). And yes, we find out who the fifth woman is, with historical links between the past and present:

“Society had grown cruel. People who felt they were unwanted or unwelcome in their own country, reacted with aggression. There was no such thing as meaningless violence. Every violent act had a meaning for the person who committed it. Only when you dared accept this truth could you hope to turn society in another direction.”

Vigilante groups, on the rise in the early nineties in Europe, taking the law into their own hands, are seen as on the rise here in Scandinavia, though Mankell makes it clear such groups of individuals have always been part of Sweden, as mercenaries from WWII on. But yes, things are getting more violent in Sweden and in the world generally. What do we do about that? Mankell doesn’t have any easy answers.

4/5

Muy fan de la narración pausada y reiterativa de Mankell.

Quería empezar a leer la serie del inspector Wallander desde el principio, pero esta novela fue la que saqué aleatoriamente de mi estantería para participar en el ... n  Reto 7 del PopSugar 2020: El primer libro que toques de tu biblioteca, estantería o colección con los ojos cerradosn