Firewall: A Kurt Wallander Mystery (Kurt Wallander Mysteries (Hardcover)) - Hardcover

Mankell, Henning

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565847679 ISBN 13: 9781565847675

Publisher: New Press, The, 2002

Synopsis

An international bestseller: Murder becomes a high tech game of cat and mouse in this "thinking man's thriller" from the master of Nordic noir (The New York Times Book Review).

Ystad, Sweden. A man stops at an ATM during his evening walk and inexplicably falls to the ground dead. Two teenage girls brutally murder a taxi driver. They are quickly apprehended, shocking local policemen with their complete lack of remorse. A few days later a blackout cuts power to a large swath of the country. When a serviceman arrives at the malfunctioning power substation, he makes a grisly discovery.

Inspector Kurt Wallander senses these events must be linked, but he has to figure out how and why. The search for answers eventually leads him dangerously close to a group of anarchic terrorists who hide in the shadows of cyberspace. Somehow, these criminals always seem to know the police department's next move. How can a small group of detectives unravel a plot designed to wreak havoc on a worldwide scale? And will they solve the riddle before it's too late?

A riveting police procedural about our increasing vulnerability in the modern digitized world, Firewall "proves once again that spending time with a glum police inspector in chilly Sweden can be quite thrilling . . . A notable success" (Publishers Weekly).

About this title

About the Author

Internationally acclaimed author Henning Mankell has written nine Kurt Wallander mysteries. The books have consistently topped the bestseller lists in Europe, receiving major literary prizes and generating numerous international film and television adaptations. Born in a village in northern Sweden in 1948, Mankell divides his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as a director at Teatro Avenida. Translator Ebba Segerberg teaches Swedish at Washington University in St. Louis.

Reviews

In the sixth Kurt Wallander book to appear in English (One Step Behind, etc.), Mankell proves once again that spending time with a glum police inspector in chilly Sweden can be quite thrilling. In the small town of Ystad, a pair of seemingly random events take place within a matter of days: two teenage girls with no apparent motive brutally beat and stab a taxi driver to death, and a remarkably healthy man checks his bank balance at an ATM and then collapses dead on the sidewalk. After two more odd murders, Wallander becomes convinced that the incidents are all connected. The recurring clues demonstrating the vulnerability of society in the electronic age remain just outside of the Luddite inspector's understanding. But once he detects a conspiracy to collapse the world's financial infrastructure on a specific date, Wallander, whose position at work is already imperiled, ignores office politics and protocol to stop the would-be revolutionary. Although Wallander and his investigative team are forced to work at a dizzying speed, the pace of the book is just right, doling out new leads and intrigues right when they're needed. The only shortcoming in this otherwise smartly written mystery is that too many of the most perplexing clues discovered by Wallander are dismissed as red herrings or coincidence. Overall, however, Mankell's ambitious endeavor to combine large themes with small-town murder is a notable success.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Press, The
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1565847679
• ISBN 13: 9781565847675
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416