The Man from Beijing

December 21, 2009
A massacre in the remote Swedish village of Hesjövallen propels this complex, if diffuse, stand-alone thriller from Mankell (The Pyramid
). Judge Birgitta Roslin, whose mother grew up in the village, comes across diaries from the house of one of the 19 mostly elderly victims kept by Jan Andrén, an immigrant ancestor of Roslin's. The diaries cover Andrén's time as a foreman on the building of the transcontinental railroad in the United States. An extended flashback charts the journey of a railroad worker, San, who was kidnapped in China and shipped to America in 1863. After finding evidence linking a mysterious Chinese man to the Hesjövallen murders, Roslin travels to Beijing, suspecting that the motive for the horrific crime is rooted in the past. While each section, ranging in setting from the bleak frozen landscape of northern Sweden to modern-day China bursting onto the global playing field, compels, the parts don't add up to a fully satisfying whole. Author tour.

January 1, 2010
A sweepingly ambitious tale of corruption, injustice and revenge that ranges over three continents and 140 years, from the creator of Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander (The Pyramid, 2008, etc.).

The first person to discover the massacre at Hesjövallen is so horrified that he suffers a fatal heart attack and is hit by a truck. The stabbing and hacking of 19 neighbors and their pets in ten houses has decimated the village. Duty officer Vivi Sundberg, called to the scene, swiftly realizes that all the victims except for one unidentified boy share one of three last names—Andersson, Andrn or Magnusson—and theorizes that in a community likely to be marked by inbreeding, they may all be members of a single family. Birgitta Roslin, a judge in Helsingborg whose mother's foster parents were among the victims, connects the horror to a smaller-scale but equally brutal murder spree: the slaughter of Jack Andrn and his wife and children in Reno, Nev. A long flashback to the shameful treatment of Chinese slave laborers on the American transcontinental railroad in the 1860s supplies further hints as to the motive. But it's not until Birgitta travels to Beijing to accompany a friend on a business trip—and to gather information about a mysterious Chinese man who booked a hotel room near Hesjövallen the week of the crime—that a clear portrait of the killer begins to emerge. The improbable but touching friendship Birgitta strikes up with Hong Qui, the sister of a powerful player in the high-stakes game of Beijing construction, serves as the nerve center of Mankell's sprawling tale, even though it reveals more information to the reader than to Birgitta. Another long detour, this one to contemporary Zimbabwe, adds new resonance to the massacre back in Sweden before Wallander rings down the curtain in London's Chinatown.

Breathtakingly bold in its scope. If Mankell never links his far-flung, multigenerational horrors closely together, that's an important part of his point.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 15, 2010
A 2006 massacre in Sweden reverberates back to 19th-century China and America in this stand-alone by the author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries. When 19 of the 22 residents of a Swedish hamlet are brutally murdered, Judge Brigitta Roslin discovers that the victims include her late mother's foster parents, so she looks into the case, offering a theory counter to that of local authorities. Even after the arrest of a local man who confesses and then commits suicide, Roslin continues probing in a quest that eventually takes her to China and puts her in mortal danger. And she finds that revengewhether sweet or best served coldis a powerful motivator even after a century and a half. VERDICT Most compelling at the beginning and end, this sprawling novel becomes a leisurely examination of history's injustices and consequences as well as an intriguing postulation of how China might meet its most pressing societal problem. Mankell humanizes the earnest, even meddlesome Roslin, so that the reader can't help but wish her well. Already an international best seller, this seems destined for success here, too. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 10/1/09; 125,000-copy first printing.]Michele Leber, Arlington, VA.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2010
Mankells latest stand-alone thriller lacks the tight focus of his Wallander novels, but it still delivers plenty of suspense and a compelling protagonist. Birgitta Roslin, a district-court judge in the Swedish city of Helsingborg, finds herself involved in the horrific slaughter of 19 people in a small hamlet in rural Sweden. Roslin, who has a family connection to one of the victims, travels to the scene of the crime and makes inquiries with the local police. In two short days, she traces the only cluea red silk ribbonto a local Chinese restaurant and to a Chinese man who stayed at a hotel near the restaurant. That small strand of ribbon takes Roslin to Beijing, where she attempts to trace the mystery man, is assaulted, and encounters a government official, Hong Qui, who is conducting her own investigation into corruption at the highest levels of Chinese society. But China is only the beginning of Mankells narrative globe-trotting. The plot also careens to Mozambique and to London, not to mention lengthy flashbacks to the nineteenth-century U.S., where two Chinese brothers, sold into slavery, are building railroads. The various strains of this massive plot are skillfully interconnected, but there are too many storieseach of which could have been its own noveland Mankell spends far too much time laying out his position on modern Chinese and African politics. Still, the opening set piece, in which the murders are discovered, is a stunner, and the finale, in a London restaurant, is equally gripping. Yes, Mankell overextends himself here, but he also shows why he remains a must-read for anyone interested in the international crime novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)