Sidetracked

Product Description
A string of gruesome murders show the obvious markings of a demented serial killer, and Swedens Detective Wallander is frantic to find him before he strikes again. Sidetracked is a compelling mystery enhanced by keen social awareness.
From Publishers Weekly
Told from the perspectives of both cop and criminal, Mankell’s third Kurt Wallander mystery revolves around the veteran Swedish inspector’s search for a savage serial killer who scalps his victims after delivering a fatal hatchet blow. The novel opens as Wallander is called to a farmer’s field, where he helplessly witnesses a teenage girl’s self-immolation. The suicide unsettles the inspector, who can’t understand why someone so young would kill herself. As the police try to identify the young woman, the serial killer’s first victim, a former justice minister, is discovered on a beach in a wealthy neighborhood. Three more people are found murdered and scalped, and other signs of violence suggest that the perpetrator is becoming increasingly agitated. Following standard procedure, Wallander and his crew try to link the four victims, all male, a difficult task because their lives never seem to have intersected. Using American profiling methods as well as his own intuition, Wallander struggles to make headway in the case. What he doesn’t consider, and what readers know, is that the murderer isn’t a man but a boy, who hopes to revive his catatonic sister by the ritual presentation of the scalps. Mankell’s meticulously detailed descriptions of the inspector’s investigationAand his often lyrical portrayal of Wallander’s struggle to rearrange his thought processes in order to catch the criminalAare masterful. The author’s treatment of modern themes such as juvenile killers and broken families adds richness to what is essentially a straightforward police procedural. But above all, the novel stands out for its nuanced evocation of even the peripheral characters. Winner of Sweden’s 1997 Best Crime Novel of the Year, this is another terrific offering from the talented Mankell.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Lyrical….Meticulously detailed…. Masterful.
From the Inside Flap
Fourth in the Kurt Wallander series.
In the award-winning Sidetracked, Kurt Wallander is called to a nearby rapeseed field where a teenage girl has been loitering all day long. He arrives just in time to watch her douse herself in gasoline and set herself aflame. The next day he is called to a beach where Sweden’s former Minister of Justice has been axed to death and scalped. The murder has the obvious markings of a demented serial killer, and Wallander is frantic to find him before he strikes again. But his investigation is beset with a handful of obstacles–a department distracted by the threat of impending cutbacks and the frivolity of World Cup soccer, a tenuous long-distance relationship with a murdered policeman’s widow, and the unshakably haunting preoccupation with the young girl who set herself on fire. Fascinating and astute, Sidetracked is a compelling mystery enhanced by keen social awareness.
From Kirkus Reviews
Under ordinary circumstances, the suicide of an unknown teenager would get Inspector Kurt Wallander’s undivided attention, especially because she poured gasoline over her head and set herself aflame right in front of the horrified, helpless Wallander. But the mystery of the girls motive for killing herself is soon upstaged by the activities of one of Sweden’s rare serial killers. The crafty murderer, calling himself Geronimo, donning war paint, and traveling by moped from victim to victim, has scalped the former minister of justice and a shady art-dealer. A psychological profiler who’s been called in to work with Wallander’s team remarks sagely that it would be easier to get a fix on the victim if only there were more victims. But the next victim, when he obligingly turns up, confounds the pattern