A strange Wallander book that begins with an apparent Swedish domestic and expands into an attempt by the African white supremacists to assassinate Nelson Mandela (who as I type this on 26 June is hanging onto life and this bounces oddly or not really onto my father who is 3 days younger than Mandela and also hanging onto life).
The Africaans are aided and abetted by ex KGB thugs who have lost their domestic power and fled to South Africa from Russian Glasnost. So a big political book.
Much of it is set in South Africa and featuring a character De Clerk inter alia. Wallander loses the plot towards the end which is a feature of Mankell's writing that I don't much like; he has to metamorphose into James Bond at times which is pretty out of keeping with the rather driven but reflective detective.
But, a bold and ambitious detective novel.
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