The Dogs of Riga, by Henning Mankell
Internationally acclaimed author Henning Mankell has written numerous Kurt Wallander mysteries. The books have been published in thirty-three countries and consistently top the bestseller lists in Europe, receiving major literary prizes (including the U.K.'s Gold Dagger Award in 2002) and generating numerous international film and television adaptations.
Born in a village in northern Sweden in 1948, Mankell divides his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as the director of Teatro Avenida.
The Dogs of Riga, the second book in the popular series about Inspector Kurt Wallander, takes Wallander to Riga, Latvia, to investigate the   murder of two Eastern European criminals. This book is set against the chaotic backdrop of eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Here the provincial Swedish detective takes on a probably fruitless task: investigating the murders of two unidentified men washed up on the Swedish coast in an inflatable dinghy. The only clues he has to work on, is that their dental work suggests they're from an Eastern Bloc country, and that the raft is Yugoslavian. Detective Kurt Wallander is frustrated and uncertain whether he has the ability to solve this case, which is as mysterious as it is heinous.
Arriving in Riga, Wallander must deal with widespread governmental corruption, which opens his eyes to the unattractive reality of life in the totalitarian Eastern Bloc. And he finds himself plunged into an alien world where shadows are everywhere, where everything is watched, and with old regimes that will do anything to stay alive.
Mankell's Kurt Wallander series has often compared to the Martin Beck detective mysteries authored by the husband and wife team of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall. Wallander, like Beck, is a police detective in Sweden. Unlike Beck, whose beat was Stockholm, Wallander works in the small southern-Swedish city of Ystad. The Wallander series takes place in the 1990s while the Beck series took place in the 1960s and 1970s. While the Beck series may be richer, the Wallander books are entertaining page-turners. Mankell mostly stays well within the `police procedural' formula and has not tried to reinvent the genre. He has developed the character of Mankell and his supporting cast of characters extremely well. Wallander gets results more by perspiration than inspiration. He is a fully drawn character. We see him dealing with the break-up of a marriage, an estranged daughter, and a father who is developing senile dementia.
Dogs of Riga is a wonderful book, probably not the best in the Wallander series, but still excellent, exciting, and very entertaining.
Other great books by Henning Mankell include Kennedy's Brain: A Novel , and Faceless Killers .
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