Rating: 
Summary: One of the best mysteries I've ever read
Review: A new acquaintance was kind enough to mail me a copy of Faceless Killers, Mankell's first Kurt Wallander novel and I have been addicted ever since. The White Lioness is the most compelling of them all. Mankell's Detective Kurt Wallander is excellent company. The plots are interesting but the settings and characters are what haunt my nights and keep me reading long after a more temperate person would have turned off the light. Wallander's interior life is laid bare as he struggles with senseless murders, the frustrations of puzzling through complex homicide investigations, and his own shrinking personal life. The Swedish countryside and an isolated village in Africa become vivid background for a plot that twists and turns through the end. One caveat: this novel is dangerous to personal productivity.
Rating:
Summary: An entertaining read from an excellent author
Review: Henning Mankell writes excellent mysteries, and this is no exception. The main character Kurt Wallender comes across as an authentic, flawed character who is all-too-human. Unlike the lone wolf Philip Marlowe in Chandler's books, Wallender is a detective who is also a divorced father, a son, and a man with middle-age challenges. Mankell does an excellent job of balancing the rational pursuit of evidence found in polic procedurals with Wallender's intuition. Moreover, while many of the events themselves are violent, Mankell avoids over-the-top graphic descriptions of violence, unlike some contemporary works (Lehane's Darkness, Take My Hand or Ellroy's Black Dahlia come to mind). This, along with other Mankell books like One Step Behind and Firewall, are excellent and entertaining reads.
Rating: 
Summary: best of the Wallander mysteries?
Review: Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels are intelligent, compelling, and supremely entertaining police procedurals. The stories are constructed not as simple whodunnit's -- usually, the reader is tipped to critical information before Inspector Wallander catches on -- but rather as explorations of character and situation. Any fan of intelligent detective thrillers will find them engaging -- if not downright addictive.
Author Henning Mankell has clearly modelled the Kurt Wallander mysteries after the Sjowall/Wahloo Martin Beck series. Like Martin Beck, Kurt Wallander is a laconic, divorced, and depressed middle-aged Swedish detective, puzzled and saddened by the brutal violence and societal breakdown he witnesses. And like the Beck series, these character-driven narratives have been crafted in realistic detail.
Of the four Kurt Wallander mysteries I've read to date, THE WHITE LIONESS is my personal favorite. Though derivative of Forsyth's THE DAY OF THE JACKAL, the narrative is more ambitious than that of other Wallander books, and deftly handled. Mankell launches an array of fascinating characters into complex situations, and leaves them either dead or morally compromised. Most importantly, protagonist Wallander's disintegration-- from driven detective, to desperate renegade cop, into clinical depression -- is beautifully handled here.
For American thriller fans raised on a diet of brutal violence and lurid black comedy, these character-driven Swedish mysteries might seem a bit tame, even quaint at times. The Wallander mysteries are clearly derivative of Sjowall and Wahloo's work, but lack the narrative inventiveness of the Martin Beck novels. Still, Detective Kurt Wallander -- introspective, doubt-ridden, and world-weary -- remains a fascinating and unique creation. Recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Great Mystery/Thriller!
Review: I read a lot of novels, but haven't read a mystery/thriller in a long time. I picked up "The White Lioness" while traveling as I thought it looked interesting - especially as it is written by a Swedish author. Also - the cover of my copy claimed it was a "thinking man's thriller".The book was excellent - I just finished reading it and immediately went to Amazon to obtain the next novel in the Kurt Wallander series. The first third of the book is interesting - I was thinking that it was okay, but I wasn't real excited about it. As you get to know the characters, the story gets more and more interesting, until it became a real "page turner". The story was also good exposure to South African politics and the culture before the first free election in 1994. I read some of the other Amazon reviews - I was surprised that many folks didn't like the first chapter. I thought it was fine - it was an interesting way to introduce the plot and characters. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great Mystery/Thriller!
Review: I read a lot of novels, but haven't read a mystery/thriller in a long time. I picked up "The White Lioness" while traveling as I thought it looked interesting - especially as it is written by a Swedish author. Also - the cover of my copy claimed it was a "thinking man's thriller". The book was excellent - I just finished reading it and immediately went to Amazon to obtain the next novel in the Kurt Wallander series. The first third of the book is interesting - I was thinking that it was okay, but I wasn't real excited about it. As you get to know the characters, the story gets more and more interesting, until it became a real "page turner". The story was also good exposure to South African politics and the culture before the first free election in 1994. I read some of the other Amazon reviews - I was surprised that many folks didn't like the first chapter. I thought it was fine - it was an interesting way to introduce the plot and characters. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great Mystery/Thriller!
Review: I read a lot of novels, but haven't read a mystery/thriller in a long time. I picked up "The White Lioness" while traveling as I thought it looked interesting - especially as it is written by a Swedish author. Also - the cover of my copy claimed it was a "thinking man's thriller". The book was excellent - I just finished reading it and immediately went to Amazon to obtain the next novel in the Kurt Wallander series. The first third of the book is interesting - I was thinking that it was okay, but I wasn't real excited about it. As you get to know the characters, the story gets more and more interesting, until it became a real "page turner". The story was also good exposure to South African politics and the culture before the first free election in 1994. I read some of the other Amazon reviews - I was surprised that many folks didn't like the first chapter. I thought it was fine - it was an interesting way to introduce the plot and characters. I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Mmm... like an amateur theatrical ?
Review: I'm very sorry that I can't agree the other reviewers' praise. First, I don't understand why the author set "Chapter One" in the beginning, in which an incident is described. Through chapter 2 to 7, cops run around to look for only "what occured", which all readers have already known, but the cops. So there's nothing suspenseful in these chapters. You'd better seal chapter 1 when you start reading, start from chapter 2 and complete chapter 7, then break the seal. I recommend this way. Second, its coarseness or carelessness in details.
Though all chapters are full of oddness, just one example : At the last of chapter 15, WHY DOES THE BARTENDER KNOW THE RUSSIAN'S NAME ? Who let him know ? Does an ex-KGB agent introduce his real name here and there in his stealthy legwork ? ... And so on. But I think the worst problem is its lack of constitency. I think there are too many characters :
Only in Sweden side, there're Wallander, his daughter and dad, dad's fiancee Gertrud, Wallander's colleagues in Ystad, the Stockholm police, the Kalmar police, the victim, her family and acqintance, the stalker, the Russian villains, the assassin from South Africa, and so on (in addition to them, there're many South African side characters). And it seems that Mankell failed to manage all of them simultaneously, or gave up it. Only who spotlit act something, only when they're focused on. The rest in backstage keep silence, wait for their turn, doing nothing. It seems fatally strange, especially when considering police works. So the constitency had gone somewhere, only Wallander and the evil are chasing each other, like a slapstick. Accidents occur unbelievably fortunately, or coincidentally, without any foreshadow, helping the author. Of course it's a fiction, but to be honest, it made me imagine something like an amateur theatrical ... to my regret.
Rating:
Summary: Gripping but a little far-fetched
Review: In fact it's gripping enough that it's possible to ignore much of the time that one's credulity is being strained. The first chapter has to be one of the great stereotype-busting moments in all crime fiction, featuring as it does Louise Akerblom, an estate agent of near-saintly honesty and goodness. Sadly, however, she doesn't last long as Russian psycho Konovalenko, the bad guy's bad guy, suddenly appears to blow her brains out on p. 9. Along comes Inspector Wallander who is, at the outset, at a loss to make sense of this apparently quite pointless murder of a greatly loved young woman. But, slowly and tenaciously, he starts to dig and dig, moving ever closer to the discovery that Akerblom was killed for stumbling upon the activities of the agents of a fiendish South- African plot by highly placed Afrikers of far right political affiliation to derail the de Klerk-Mandela talks with a act of political assassination that will plunge their country into a bloodbath of racial violence, thereby wiping out any further possibility of a peaceful and negotiated end to Apartheid. The story is told from two ends, Swedish and South African, and from the multiple perspectives of, inter alia, Victor Mabasha, the contract killer Konovalenko is training to carry out the assassination, of Jan Kleyn, the arch plotter, of Pieter van Heerden and Georg Scheepers the South Africans investigating the plotters on behalf of de Klerk, of de Klerk and Mandela themselves, but of course above all from the perspective of Wallander himself, increasingly obsessed and, as the story unfolds, ever closer to breakdown. Part of his problem may be that he has to get through the whole story without any love interest to sustain him, though his complex relationships with his father and daughter and his old friend Sten Widen sustain at least the reader. The Swedish end of the story starts out as a rather satisfying mystery before turning halfway through into a slightly less satisfying thriller as Wallender and Konovalenko play cat and mouse. It is certainly gripping, page-turning stuff but one cannot help feeling, with Wallander's colleague Svedberg (on p. 337), that: "It was all too much for a little police district like Ystad."
Rating:
Summary: Superb!!!!
Review: Mankell can certainly give Patterson, Sanford, and Connelly a run for their money. His writing is tight, controlled, and swift. His characters are so real that by the time you finish the book, you can describe them as if you had dinner with them last night. Several parallel storylines converge together seamlessly, giving the reader the impression that Mankell simply penned the entire book in one sitting! This guy can write!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Change of scenery
Review: Reading a thriller written by a swedish author is a new experience to me. Mankell is a talented writer who praises his plots above everything, even above character development and book edition. Some pretty clear mistakes, like a totally wrong-placed first chapter and too many coincidences that help the main character, have to be forgiven so that the reader can fully enjoy "The white lioness". Sweden and South Africa are linked by a white-supremacy conspiracy that intends to train in Scandinavia a black killer whose mission is to kill one of the two most important men in the african country: De Klerk and Mandela. The book is mainly divided between scenes in Sweden and South Africa. The ones in Sweden are a little too slow, and the reader has to pay full attention to remain interested in the story. The parts in South Africa are more interesting. The main character, swedish inspector Kurt Wallander, is an anti-hero: low-profile, coward, has bad-relationship with his father and daughter. Yet, he's very likable. The reader unwillingly takes Wallander side on the story, even when he does everything wrong. That's his power. Many other characters are part of the plot, some of them more interesting than others. The ending is a little too rushed, and in my opinion could be more developed. This is a very straight and correct book. Mankell doesn't risk too much concerning his writing style. I understand Mankell has already written several other books featuring Inspector Wallander, and "The white lioness" is only the second one. Also, Mankell was previously known for his children books and his theater plays. I'm pretty sure that his plots and characters show much improvement in more recent books, but nonetheless this one is a preety good way to get to know Henning Mankell. Grade 8.0/10
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