In one of his epigraphs, Mankell quotes the second law of thermodynamics to the effect that there are always more disordered than ordered systems. Modern Sweden has prided itself on being an ordered system, not so much ordered by regulation as with, say, Switzerland, but more ordered by the rationality of its populace, and their agreement on a social compact. Thirty years ago, the police novels of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo suggested to us that Sweden's social compact might be more illusory than anyone dared suspect. Mankell appears to go a step further. Kurt Wallender's surname doesn't suggest quite as sharply in Swedish the sense of a man bumping into a wall on a dead-end street, but the novels themselves certainly do. The contrast between a Sweden sometimes imagined and sometimes disappeared, and the modern world of sordid crime which Wallender investigates is made repeatedly and pointedly. Killers like the serial murderer in this novel were something even the most rational Swede could never imagine. One of the victims is a colleague of Wallender's, and his hidden private life, which would be a clue, remains hidden far too long, victim of the deep reserve of Swedish formality. Wallender's Sweden is a world whose time has passed, and whose efforts to adjust to that passing are pathetically limited. That Mankell can say so much while following police procedure mark him as one of the greats of the genre.
