The Dogs of Riga

I’m not reading the Henning Mankell books as quickly as the Camilla Läckberg books, but I’m still enjoying them!

In The Dogs of Riga, Kurt Wallander investigates two bodies that wash up on the Swedish coastline in a life raft. The police determine the bodies are Latvian and Major Liepa fromthe Riga police force comes to Sweden to work on the investigation. The Swedish part of the case is closed and he returns to Latvia to finish his investigation, but the night he returns, he is murdered. The Riga police request Wallander’s help in Riga and Wallander gets involved in some crazy business in a country just coming out from under Soviet rule. There are spies everywhere, bribes are normal and he can’t trust anyone. The book has a few crazy twists and surprises, but in the end things work out, sort of…

I’m excited to read the next book – there were a few inconsistencies that bothered my editors brain – I’m not sure if they were inconsistencies in the story or the translation – the glaring one was the Peugeot Wallander traded in for a Nissan at the end of Faceless Killers had morphed back into a Peugeot. There were a few others – the use of the word “mean” when describing someone cheap and the favourite Swedish expression, “blind alley,” which I feel is more British and I’d be more likely to use “dead end,” but hey, I don’t speak Swedish and I’m by no means a translator.