A tale moving from the final months of World War II to the present, and from the Russian front to contemporary South Africa, follows the dual adventures of a freedom-seeking war martyr and an alcoholic police officer who is drawn into a mystery with past origins
It is Midsummer's Eve, three young friends gather in a wood. In the still-sunlit Scandanavian dusk, they don costumes joyfully to enact - or so it appears to an unseen observer - a kind of masque. The hidden watcher soon brings their performance to an end. His approach is careful; his aim is perfect. Three bullets, three corpses. The murderer then carefully photographs the grisly tableau. The Ystad police station meanwhile is experiencing a summer lull, indeed Inspector Wallander is at last at liberty to attend to - albeit reluctantly - his deteriorating health, but his peace of mind is shattered when one of his colleagues is murdered. An unknown killer, seen by no-one, is on the loose, and the police's only lead is a photograph of three dead young people in costume. Forced to dig more deeply than he would have wanted into the personal life of one of his colleagues, Wallander's investigation reveals something none of his team could ever have imagined. However, they remain tantalisingly, terrifyingly one step behind the lethal progress of a killer Wallander would have to suppose was deranged if his methods were not so meticulous and his victims so clinically targeted.
A young woman is murdered in her Oslo flat. One finger has been severed from her left hand, and behind her eyelid is secreted a tiny red diamond in the shape of a five-pointed star a pentagram, the devils star. Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case with his long-time adversary Tom Waaler and initially wants no part in it. But Harry is already on notice to quit the force and is left with little alternative but to drag himself out of his alcoholic stupor and get to work. A wave of similar murders is on the horizon. An emerging pattern suggests that Oslo has a serial killer on its hands, and the five-pointed devils star is key to solving the riddle.
One night the baker Jose Antonio Maria Vaz hears gunfire from the deserted theatre next door to his bakery. Bemused he races up to the uppermost gallery and there beneath him on a spot-lit stage is the wounded body of Nelio, the fabled street urchin, renowned throughout the city for living on his wits. Gasping, Nelio asks to be taken to the roof to breathe in the beautiful air, fresh off the indian ocean. There on the theatre roof, his life ebbing away, Nelio begans his story. At the age of five, Nelio witnessed his village burn to the ground, and the brutal massacre of his people by bandits. He himself escaped by chance; a man handed Nelio a gun and ordered him to shoot another boy, instead he turned the gun on the bandit, shot and ran. He made his way to the coast, encountering bizarre characters en route who gave him guidence. Upon arrival in the city Nelio joined a rough street gang, and began a very different way of life. A dazzling departure from the master of crime, Henning Mankell's CHRONICLER OF THE WINDS takes us to the African continent, a place for which the author has a great passion. An expertly crafted fable.
OVER 33 MILLION BOOKS SOLD WORLDWIDE 'This book had my pulse in the red zone from start to finish' Michael Connelly It is a freezing December night and Christmas shoppers have gathered to listen to a carol concert. Then a shot rings out and one of the singers falls to the floor, dead. Detective Harry Hole and his team are called in to investigate but have little to work with - there is no immediate suspect, no weapon and no motive. But when the assassin discovers he's shot the wrong man, Harry finds his troubles have only just begun. 'Nesbo is in a class of his own' Evening Standard 'Terrific shocks, tension and atmosphere' The Times
Maggio 1993: in Algeria i fondamentalisti islamici uccidono quattro suore. La quinta donna massacrata è una turista svedese. La polizia algerina cerca di insabbiare il caso. Settembre 1994: una serie di orribili delitti scuote il sud della Svezia. Un anziano signore, appassionato bird-watcher, cade in una trappola feroce. Il suo corpo viene ritrovato in pasto ai corvi, trapassato da canne di bambù. Qualche giorno dopo, nel bosco, legato a un albero si scopre il cadavere di un FIorista: è stato strangolato. Non passa molto tempo che il corpo senza vita di un ricercatore dell’università riafFIora, chiuso in un sacco, tra le acque di un lago. Omicidi crudeli, perpetrati con una tecnica che non lascia dubbi sull’esistenza di un unico colpevole. Apparentemente non esiste un movente, né s’intravedono elementi che permettano di trovare una relazione tra le vittime. Tocca ancora al commissario Wallander, del distretto di Ystad, aprire un faticoso spiraglio tra le indagini e mettere insieme i pezzi di una storia incredibile. Aiutato da una collega molto efFIciente, Kurt Wallander scoprirà quale sconcertante FIlo leghi il passato degli uomini caduti per mano di un oscuro assassino.
Stopping to use a cash machine one evening, a man falls to the ground- dead. A taxi driver is brutally murdered by two teenage girls who demonstrate a complete lack of remorse. One girl escapes police custody and disappears without trace. Soon afterwards, a blackout covers half the country. When an engineer arrives at the malfunctioning power station, he makes a grisly discovery... Inspector Kurt Wallander is sure that these events must be linked - somehow. Hampered by the discovery of betrayals in his own team, lonely and frustrated, Wallander begins to lose conviction in his role as a detective. And somehow these criminals seem always to know the police's next move.
After killing a man in the line of duty, Inspector Kurt Wallander finds himself spiralling into an alcohol-fuelled depression. He has just decided to leave the police when an old friend approaches him for help investigating his father's suspicious death. Kurt doesn't want to know. But then his friend is found shot dead. Against his better judgment, he returns to work to head what may now have become a double murder case. But while Wallander is on the trail of the killer, somebody is on the trail of Wallander, and closing in fast.
From the dean of Scandinavian noir, come s a riveting mystery set in frozen north of Sweden. .When retired policeman Herbert Molin is found brutally slaughtered on his remote farm in the northern forests of Sweden, police find strange tracks in the snow — as if someone had been practicing the tango. Stefan Lindman, a young police officer recently diagnosed with mouth cancer, decides to investigate the murder of his former colleague, but is soon enmeshed in a mystifying case with no witnesses and no apparent motives. Terrified of the disease that could take his life, Lindman becomes more and more reckless as he unearths the chilling links between Molin’s death and an underground neo-Nazi network that runs further and deeper than he could ever have imagined.
Detective Wallander is haunted by the spectre of a murder he was unable to prevent as a young policeman. Years after the event, the daughter of the murder victim, now a heroin addict, dies of an overdose. A distressed Wallander is assigned to investigate the crash of a light airplane and a detonated armour piercing shell is found in the wreckage. A few days later, two elderly sisters are killed in an explosion in a sewing supplies shop. Traces of an advanced explosive are found in the burnt-out shop and evidence soon mounts to indicate that both events are tied to a showdown between two rival narcotics gangs.
CRIME & MYSTERY. In peaceful Southern Sweden, Louise Akerblom, an estate agent, pillar of the Methodist church, wife and mother, disappears. There is no explanation and no motive. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team are called in to investigate. As Inspector Wallander is introduced to this missing person's case, he has a gut feeling that the victim will never be found alive. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela has made his long walk to freedom, setting in train the country's painful journey towards the end of Apartheid. Wallander and his colleagues find themselves caught up in a complex web involving renegade members of South Africa's secret service and a former KGB agent, all of whom are set upon halting Mandela's rise to power. In an increasingly globalised world, Wallander and his team are faced with international terrorism which knows no frontiers - they must prevent a hideous crime that means to dam the tide of history.
The first case of Inspector Kurt Wallander. He drinks too much, he works too hard, and he sleeps too little. His life is a shambles. But all of a sudden these are the least of his worries. Wallander is a senior police officer at Ystad, a small town in the wind- lashed Swedish province of Skåne. His wife has left him, his daughter won't speak to him, his ageing father barely tolerates him. Then, at 5 a.m. on a frozen January morning, he responds to a routine call. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death in his isolated farmhouse; his wife is lying barely alive beside him. Wallander has one clue: the killers may have been foreign. When this information is leaked, xenophobia is unleashed in Skåne, and Wallander finds himself in a race against time: solve the crimes or the death toll will rise. --back cover
"Sweden, winter, 1991. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off. A few days later a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead. The dead men were criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit. But what appears 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, where he 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, only Wallander's obstinate desire to see that justice is done brings the truth to light." -- Book cover.
When Kurt Wallander is called into the case of the disappearance of a retired naval officer, coincidentally his daughter's future father-in-law, he becomes embroiled in a story of Cold War espionage.
Stockholm 1975: Six young people take the entire staff of the West German embassy hostage, demanding that the Baader-Meinhof members being held as prisoners in West Germany be released immediately. The long siege ends with the deaths of two hostages and the wounding of several others, including the captors.
Durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, un gruppo di giovani soldati norvegesi era stato scelto e inviato a combattere a fianco dell’esercito tedesco alle porte di Leningrado. Una volta tornati in patria, quegli uomini avevano trovato ad attenderli un’accusa di alto tradimento e il carcere duro. Ora, a distanza di sessant’anni, quell’inferno non è ancora finito, e uno dopo l’altro iniziano a morire in circostanze oscure. In questa torbida vicenda si imbatte Harry Hole, poliziotto dell’antiterrorismo dal grilletto facile e con un debole per l’alcol. Lui la violenza è abituato a guardarla negli occhi ogni giorno, senza tregua. E mentre indaga sulla minaccia di un attentato ai danni dei reali di Norvegia, che si fa ogni giorno più concreta, uno strano ritrovamento attira la sua attenzione: i monti intorno a Oslo gli restituiscono alcuni bossoli di un Märklin, un fucile di precisione tedesco di cui erano stati costruiti solo trecento esemplari. E sulle tracce di quest’insolita arma si addentrerà in una palude di tradimenti e vendette da cui sarà difficile riemergere.
A TV talk-show star is found killed in her home, her tongue removed and left near to the body. When a second body, that of a prominent politician, is found crucified soon after, Superintendent Adam Stubo is called in to lead the investigation of both murders. Unable to establish whether these two gruesome slayings are linked, or what the meaning is behind the manner of death, Stubo calls in his psychologist wife Johanne Vik to help. As Vik reviews the crimes she begins to see a pattern that chills her to the core. If her theory is correct then more killings will follow, and the spree will end in the murder of the investigating officer: Adam Stubo. From internationally bestselling author Anne Holt, The Final Murder is a dark and gripping novel.
A moving, compelling and powerful new novel by the author of Depths and the Wallander Mysteries
"In the Swedish hamlet of Hesjövallen, nineteen people have been found dead. 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. A nineteenth-century diary and a red silk ribbon found in the forest nearby are her only clues"--Cover.
È una calda giornata di giugno, Josefin Cederén cammina con la figlia Emily lungo la strada di un quartiere residenziale di Uppsala, quando improvvisamente una macchina le investe con violenza, uccidendole. Quello stesso giorno, scompare Sven-Erik Cederén, marito e padre delle due vittime, ora principale sospettato del duplice omicidio. Ma davvero si è trattato di un dramma privato? È possibile che un uomo arrivi ad annientare la propria famiglia? Alla guida delle indagini, Ann Lindell, trentacinque anni, da quindici all'anticrimine di Uppsala, non ne è del tutto convinta. C'è anche un'altra pista che si fa strada: Cederén potrebbe essere coinvolto in un clamoroso scandalo farmaceutico internazionale. Impegnata nelle ricerche con la determinazione che la distingue, Ann intanto sente sempre più forte il desiderio di una vita normale, ma proprio quando è convinta che le cose comincino a girare nel verso giusto, si trova improvvisamente davanti a una scelta decisiva che rimette tutto in discussione. Esponente di spicco della scuola del giallo svedese, Kjell Eriksson è stato il primo a fare di una donna la protagonista di una serie poliziesca di successo, ottenendo un riconoscimento da parte della polizia di Stoccolma per l'autenticità e l'impegno del suo racconto.
The gripping third instalment in Anne Holt's Vik/Stubo series. When the first female US president is kidnapped on a state visit to Norway, Johanne Vik and Adam Stubo must race against time to prevent a national security crisis.
Terza edizione
Notte di solstizio: tre giovani in una macchia isolata del bosco nei pressi di Osterlen. Qualcuno li spia. La loro festa si tinge di sangue. Intanto, la quiete della centrale di polizia di Ystad è spezzata dal ritrovamento del corpo di Svedberg, da anni collega di Wallander, ucciso da tre colpi di pistola sparati in pieno volto. Due foto tra le carte di Svedberg convincono Wallander dell'inesorabile intreccio tra i due casi di omicidio, ma l'assassino è sempre un passo in anticipo sulle mosse degli investigatori, che sono alle prese con gli inquietanti segreti di "uno di loro", un uomo che credevano di conoscere. E' impossibile intuirne i movimenti, prevedere chi sarà la sua prossima vittima: in una calma apparente cova la follia criminale.
