The White Lioness

Henning Mankell

Mankell once again takes the action away from Sweden and, once again, the book is weaker for it. In The White Lioness Inspector Wallander investigates the case of an estate agent who goes missing from his home town of Ystaad. The trail leads him to a group of white supremacist South Africans who are using remote farmhouses in Sweden to train their assassins. Added to the mix is a disaffected ex-KGB Russians who hopes his alliance with the South Africans will earn him a passport to Cape Town. A s I've said, the thriller is satisfying enough when Mankell stays close to home. But the excursions to South Africa read like those Wilbur Smith novels which 11-year-old boys gobble up and which you often glimpse on the bookshelves of men who don't read.

Also, Mankell's plotting does fall into a trap which you sometimes encounter in a certain kind of thriller. Our hero's chief foe is described at the start as a fanatical, skilled, clinical and ruthless operator, able to kill with surgical precision and then melt away into nothingness. Only for him to demonstrate in the rest of the novel, as bystanders are butchered and burglaries botched, all the precision of Laurel and Hardy. Nevertheless it's this trail of destruction which gives us our 439 pages of drama so perhaps it has to be allowed.