Before The Frost: Summary and book reviews of Before The Frost by Henning Mankell, plus links to an excerpt from Before The Frost and a biography of Henning Mankell.
Before The Frost
by Henning Mankell
Hardcover: Feb 2005,
383 pages.
Paperback: Feb 2006,
384 pages.
In this latest atmospheric thriller, Kurt Wallander and his daughter Linda join forces to
search for a religious fanatic on a murder spree. Just graduated from the police
academy, Linda Wallander returns to Skane to join the police force, and she
already shows all the hallmarks of her father--the maverick approach, the
flaring temper. Before she even starts work she becomes embroiled in the case of
her childhood friend Anna, who has inexplicably disappeared. As the case her
father is working on dovetails with her own, something far more dangerous than
either could have imagined begins to emerge. They soon find themselves forced to
confront a group of extremists bent on punishing the world's sinners.
The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio
It's a good thing, though, that Mankell hasn't put Wallander entirely out to pasture, because his gravitas is sorely needed to lend credibility to the more bizarre elements of the story. ....Linda has a future in this series; but it takes a seasoned philosopher like Wallander to make sense of the horrors that men do to honor their gods.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Gripping, beautifully orchestrated .... Henning Mankell is an addictive writer.
Kirkus Reviews
Though Mankell's novels can be painfully slow, they're never without their virtues, and this case is redeemed by the electricity between a father and daughter too much alike.
Publishers Weekly
As always with Mankell, the mystery is connected to larger issues--the decline of Swedish civility, of course, but also the danger of religious fundamentalism (the events are set in the weeks before 9/11)--but polemics never trumps suspense in this extraordinarily compelling drama.
Booklist - Bill Ott
Starred Review. This is a fine thriller on its own, but Mankell's real triumph is to stay focused on Linda, a rookie cop whose expertise and worldview are entirely different from her father's, while at the same time revealing new and fascinating aspects of the curmudgeonly Kurt's character.
Michael Ondaatje
For me, Henning Mankell is by far the best writer of police mysteries today.
The Kurt Wallender series is set primarily in
Mankell's native Sweden. You'll find Sweden in the
north of Europe between Finland and Norway. With a population of about 9
million, a landmass about the same size as California and a stable
population, most people enjoy a good quality of life (albeit cold at some times
of the year). Sweden was a military power up until the 17th
century (and long before - think Vikings!), but has not
participated in any war for almost 200 years.
More about Sweden.
The apolcalyptic
plot that Wallander and his daughter uncover has its beginnings in the
1978 mass suicide of Jim Jones's followers. Born in 1931, Jones
founded the People's Temple church in 1953. Following disturbing
reports by people who had succeeded in leaving the cult, Jones moved to
Guyana in South America; 800 of his congregation followed him. In
...
The Reykjavik police are called on an icy January day to a garden where a body has been found: a young, dark-skinned boy is frozen to the ground in a pool of his own blood. Erlendur and his team embark on their investigation and soon unearth tensions simmering beneath the surface of Iceland’s outwardly liberal, multicultural society.
Critically acclaimed across Europe, Karin Fossum's Inspector Sejer novels are masterfully constructed, psychologically convincing, and compulsively readable. They evoke a world that is at once profoundly disturbing and terrifyingly familiar.
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(543 words).
The New York Times - Marilyn Stasio
Michael Ondaatje
