Kurt Wallander Series

The Kurt Wallander series, created by author Henning Mankell, follows detective Kurt Wallander as he grapples with dark and complex crimes in the picturesque Swedish town of Ystad. The series explores not only the investigations themselves but also Wallander's personal struggles and moral dilemmas. Alongside thrilling plots, it reflects social and political issues of contemporary times. Wallander becomes a symbol of the modern detective facing not only crime but also his own demons.

A Kurt Wallander Mystery: The Fifth Woman

Recommended Reading Order

Faceless Killers
Henning Mankell
280 pages
10 hours of reading
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME • The mystery thriller series that inspired the Netflix crime drama Young Wallander • From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the first riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series. It was a senselessly violent crime: on a cold night in a remote Swedish farmhouse an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death, and his wife is left to die with a noose around her neck. And as if this didn’t present enough problems for the Ystad police Inspector Kurt Wallander, the dying woman’s last word is foreign, leaving the police the one tangible clue they have–and in the process, the match that could inflame Sweden’s already smoldering anti-immigrant sentiments. Unlike the situation with his ex-wife, his estranged daughter, or the beautiful but married young prosecuter who has peaked his interest, in this case, Wallander finds a problem he can handle. He quickly becomes obsessed with solving the crime before the already tense situation explodes, but soon comes to realize that it will require all his reserves of energy and dedication to solve.
1
3.8
The Dogs of Riga
Henning Mankell
326 pages
12 hours of reading
It is winter, 1991. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team at the Ystad police station in Skane, southern Sweden, receive an anonymous tip-off. A few days later what they have been warned of comes to pass: a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead
2
3.8
The White Lioness
Henning Mankell
500 pages
18 hours of reading
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.
3
3.8
The Man who Smiled
Henning Mankell
448 pages
16 hours of reading
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.
4
3.9
Sidetracked (Kurt Wallender Mystery)
Henning Mankell
Midsummer approaches, and Inspector Kurt Wallander prepares for a holiday with the new woman in his life, hopeful that his wayward daughter and his ageing father will cope without him. But his restful summer plans are thrown into disarray when a teenage girl commits suicide before his eyes, and a former minister of justice is butchered in the first of a series of apparently motiveless murders. Wallander's desperate hunt for the girl's identity and his furious pursuit of a killer who scalps his victims will throw him and those he loves most into mortal danger. WINNER OF THE CRIME WRITERS' ASSOCIATION GOLD DAGGER
5
4.1
A Kurt Wallander Mystery: The Fifth Woman
Henning Mankell
437 pages
16 hours of reading
Inspector Kurt Wallander is home from an idyllic holiday in Rome, full of energy and plans for the future. But when he investigates the disappearence of an elderly birdwatcher he discovers a gruesome and meticulously planned murder - a body impaled in a trap of sharpened bamboo poles. Then another man is reported missing. And once again Wallander's life is on hold as he and his team work tirelessly to find a link between the series of vicious murders. Forever battling to make sense of the violence of modern Sweden, Wallander leads a massive investigation to uncover a brutal killer.
6
4.1
One Step Behind
Henning Mankell
440 pages
16 hours of reading
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.
7
4.1
Firewall
Henning Mankell
416 pages
15 hours of reading
Inspector Kurt Wallander begins to suspect a connection between a series of crimes--the murder of a taxi driver by two teenage girls, the escape of one of the culprits, a power blackout, and a grisly discovery at the malfunctioning power station
8
4.0
Before the Frost
Henning Mankell
384 pages
14 hours of reading
In woodland outside Ystad, the police make a horrific discovery: a severed head, and hands locked together in an attitude of prayer. A Bible lies at the victim's side, the pages marked with scribbled corrections.
9
3.9
An Event in Autumn
Henning Mankell
169 pages
6 hours of reading
The eleventh riveting installment in the mystery thriller series that inspired the Netflix crime drama Young Wallander • Wallander is "one of the most impressive creations in crime fiction today.... An old-fashioned moral force and sense of disquiet of the sort rarely found in contemporary crime fiction." —The Guardian After nearly thirty years in the same job, Inspector Kurt Wallander is tired, restless, and itching to make a change. He is taken with a certain old farmhouse, perfectly situated in a quiet countryside with a charming, overgrown garden. There he finds the skeletal hand of a corpse in a shallow grave. Wallander’s investigation takes him deep into the history of the house and the land, until finally the shocking truth about a long-buried secret is brought to light. Includes an afterword by the author.
10
3.7
The Troubled Man
Henning Mankell
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.
11
3.8

Related books

The pyramid
Henning Mankell
When Kurt Wallander first appeared in 'Faceless Killers', he was a senior police officer, just turned 40, with his life in a mess. His wife had left him, his father barely acknowledged him, he ate badly and drank alone at night. 'The Pyramid' chronicles the events that led him to such a place.
3.9
The return of the dancing master
Henning Mankell
407 pages
15 hours of reading
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.
3.9