Return Of The Dancing Master

Mankell's Kurt Wallander series is one of the quintessential new European procedurals, pitting a melancholy Swedish detective against a hate-filled contemporary world. Wallander is absent here, but the unremitting horror of modern life continues to take its toll, this time on a different crew of overmatched Swedish cops. A younger version of Wallander, Stefan Lindman faces a host of personal demons, not the least of which is his recent diagnosis of mouth cancer. On leave and unwilling to face up to his illness, he decides to travel to the small village of Sveg, where a retired colleague, Herbert Molin, has been murdered. Helping to investigate the crime, Lindman is shocked to discover that Molin was a lifelong Nazi. Suddenly, Lindman's alternative "therapy" has landed him in the middle of an international ring of neo-Nazis. As always, Mankell tells somber, deeply pessimistic stories about widespread hatred lurking below the multicultural surface, but at the same time, he never fails to find a rich vein of humanity deep within the perpetually furrowed brows of his troubled cops.