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.

Recommended Reading Order

1
Faceless Killers
Henning Mankell
298 pages
11 hours of reading
3.8(61146)Add rating
One frozen January morning at 5am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he believes is a routine call-out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, both victims of a violence beyond reason. The woman supplies Wallander with his only clue: the perpetrators may have been foreign. When this is leaked to the press, it unleashes racial hatred. Kurt Wallander is a senior police officer. His life is a shambles. His wife has left him, his daughter refuses to speak to him, and even his aging father barely tolerates him. He works tirelessly, eats badly, and drinks his night away in a lonely, neglected flat. But now, with winter tightening and his activities being monitored by a tough-minded district attorney, Wallander must forget his troubles and throw himself into a battle against time and against mounting xenophobia. (back cover)
2
The Dogs of Riga
Henning Mankell
326 pages
12 hours of reading
3.8(21779)Add rating
When a life raft carrying the bodies of two Eastern European criminals washes up on the Swedish coastline, Inspector Kurt Wallender travels to Riga, Latvia, where he struggles against corruption and deceit and risks his own life to uncover the truth.
3
The White Lioness
Henning Mankell
565 pages
20 hours of reading
3.8(989)Add rating
In 1992, in peaceful Southern Sweden, Louise Akerblom, an estate agent, pillar of the Methodist church, wife and mother, disappears. 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.
4
Mannen som log
Henning Mankell
3.9(622)Add rating
Staying alive becomes a precarious task for Inspector Kurt Wallander as he plays both hunter and hunted in a terrifying game of money and power. Two men have died and an enigmatic business tycoon who hides behind an entourage of brusque secretaries and tight security seems to be the link between the two deaths.
5
Sidetracked
Henning Mankell
437 pages
16 hours of reading
4.1(18197)Add rating
A young girl, possibly a foreigner, commits suicide in baffling circumstances. One, and then another, and then another vicious murder - and not one of them with an obvious motive - shatter the tranquility of the Swedish province of Skane. It falls to Inspector Kurt Wallander of the Ystad Police to try and solve the crimes.
6
The Fifth Woman
Henning Mankell
448 pages
16 hours of reading
4.1(21237)Add rating
Four nuns and a fifth woman, a visitor to Africa, are killed in a savage night-time attack. Months later, in Sweden, the news of the tragedy sets off a cruel vengeance for these killings. But when inspector Kurt Wallander investigates the disappearance of an elderly bird-watcher he discovers a gruesome and meticulously planned murder.
7
One Step Behind
Henning Mankell
448 pages
16 hours of reading
4.1(15389)Add rating
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.
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8
Firewall
Henning Mankell
544 pages
20 hours of reading
4.0(14203)Add rating
Stopping to get money from a cash machine one evening, a man inexplicably falls to the ground: dead. A taxi dirver is brutally murdered by two teenaged girls. Quickly apprehended they appal local policemen with their total 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. The search for answers leads Wallander dangerously close to a shadowy group of anarchic terrorists, hidden within the anonymity of cyberspace. Somehow these criminals seem always to know the police's next move. Wallander finds himself fighting to outsmart them In their gripping police procedural about our increasing vulnerability in the modern digitalised world.
9
Before the Frost
Henning Mankell
384 pages
14 hours of reading
3.9(9555)Add rating
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.
10
An Event in Autumn
Henning Mankell
169 pages
6 hours of reading
3.7(4367)Add rating
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.
11
The Troubled Man
Henning Mankell
3.8(346)Add rating
Every morning H�kan von Enke takes a walk in the forest near his apartment in Stockholm. However, one winter's day he fails to come home. It seems that the retired naval officer has vanished without trace. Detective Kurt Wallander is not officially involved in the investigation but he has personal reasons for his interest in the case as H�kan's son is engaged to his daughter Linda. A few months earlier, at H�kan's 75th birthday party, Kurt noticed that the old man appeared uneasy and seemed eager to talk about a controversial incident from his past career that remained shrouded in mystery. Could this be connected to his disappearance? When H�kan's wife Louise also goes missing, Wallander is determined to uncover the truth. His search leads him down dark and unexpected avenues involving espionage, betrayal and new information about events during the Cold War that threatens to cause a political scandal on a scale unprecedented in Swedish history. The investigation also forces Kurt to look back over his own past and consider his hopes and regrets, as he comes to the unsettling realisation that even those we love the most can remain strangers to us. And then an even darker cloud appears on the horizon... The return of Kurt Wallander, for his final case, has already caused a sensation around the globe. The Troubled Man confirms Henning Mankell's position as the king of crime writing.

The Pyramid
Henning Mankell
496 pages
18 hours of reading
3.9(672)Add rating
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.
The return of the dancing master
Henning Mankell
407 pages
15 hours of reading
3.9(6191)Add rating
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.