Before The Frost Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, Background and our BookBrowse Review of Before The Frost.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

About This Book
Fans of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series have two reasons to rejoice at the appearance of his new novel, Before the Frost. Kurt Wallander is back, as good as ever, and now he is joined by his daughter Linda, who has just graduated from the police academy and is eager to begin her career–and to prove herself to her father.

In one of Mankell's most compelling and suspenseful tales, Linda Wallander finds herself drawn into a plot that threatens the lives of two of her closest friends and, indeed, her own. Just a few days shy of officially joining the Ystad police force, she is given a vivid and terrifying preview of the difficulties and dangers of the work that awaits her. She expects to start out dealing with nothing more challenging than breaking up drunken street fights, but when her friend Anna Westin disappears, and when the police start receiving bizarre reports of animals–swans, a calf, cats in a pet store–being set on fire, followed by a grisly murder deep in the woods, Linda is plunged into the center of a case that seems as unsolvable as it is brutal. While Kurt Wallander tries to piece these macabre reports together, Linda undertakes her own investigation of Anna's disappearance and learns that the friend she thought she knew so well is becoming increasingly difficult to fathom and trust. Soon a woman is found ritualistically murdered in a church, a mutual friend of Anna and Linda is abducted, and the case takes on a desperate urgency. Linda, her father, and the rest of the Ystad police are faced with an array of seemingly disconnected and motiveless crimes. As Linda and her father make the connections between them, they uncover an apocalyptic plan that has its beginnings in the 1978 mass suicide of Jim Jones's followers in Guyana.

Bound up in these mysterious crimes are some essential human mysteries that Mankell explores with extraordinary psychological acumen–the father-daughter relationship, religious fanaticism, the search for meaning, and the ultimate unknowability of human beings, whether friends, family, or oneself.


Discussion Questions

1. What kind of woman is Linda Wallander? In what ways is she both like and unlike her father? What is the appeal of reading about a policewoman in a genre dominated by men?
2. How does Before the Frost illuminate the growing religious violence around the world, from the Christian Right's bombing of abortion clinics here in the United States to the Islamic fundamentalists campaign of terrorism in the Middle East and elsewhere? What does the novel reveal about the motives and psychology of religious extremists?
3. In what ways does Linda Wallander prove herself throughout the novel? At which crucial moments does her willingness to trust her intuition enable her to make breakthroughs in the case? Could the case have been solved without Linda?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Vintage. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.