So that’s it, then? The last Mankell novel featuring his demorilised Swedish everyman-detective Kurt Wallander. Our hero has turned 60 and is the last-but-one left standing of his original police squad that, like the Sweden he inhabits, he barely recognises. Then there are the worrying bouts of memory loss afflicting him. Still, he has just enough piss and vinegar left to get to the bottom of a Cold War cold case that suddenly heats up as an old ex-Navy man disappears who is Wallander’s daughter’s partner’s father. Convoluted? Kinda. This time it’s personal? You could say that. In fact, that’s one reason I’m so enamoured with the Wallander mysteries, Wallander with his Alzheimer-addled father, headstrong daughter Linda and love interests ex-wife Mona and ex-lover Baiba, seems to jump (unwillingly) off the page as more real than reality. So, yes I’m saddened that this will be the last Wallander novel I’ll ever read — but I was releaved to discover there’s one more Wallander novella, An Event in Autumn, that Mankell published 2014, the year before his death. It’s on it’s way from a Reno used-bookstore as I type this, so I can at least look forward to one more final, last Wallander adventure. A sad pleasure, I hope.

No. 8 of 12 books I intend to read and review in 2025.

I’m Patrick Sherriff, an Englishman who survived 13 years working for newspapers in the US, UK and Japan. Between teaching English lessons at my conversation school in Abiko, Japan, I write and illustrate textbooks for non-native speakers of English, release Hana Walker mystery novels, short stories, paint, and write essays and Our Man in Abiko, a monthly  newsletter   highlighting good writing in English, often about about Japan, art, crime fiction and teaching.