Hypercrime

If you haven’t yet found Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, this post is for you. Here is a series which is guaranteed to take the casual reader of crime fiction and turn them into a fully committed Scandinavian crime addict. This is an extraordinary series which should be savored. A good series is really a special and rare thing. In mystery and crime fiction, series are very common, but few are capable of maintaining such consistent intensity as Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series.

Lately, many people have asked me what the sequence of the series is, so I’ll post it here for reference.

The books in the series are:

Faceless Killers
The Dogs of Riga
The White Lioness
The Man Who Smiled
Sidetracked
The Fifth Woman
One Step Behind
Firewall

Those are the main novels in the series. Then there are the following two which extend the series. The Pyramid is the story of Wallander’s first case and contains several other shorter stories all of which expand the backstory. I recommend reading this collection after the novels as they bring the story right up to the morning on which the story in Faceless Killers starts. It makes a nice circle. Before the Frost is a novel featuring Wallander’s daughter Linda in her first investigation. Linda appears in the series as a wandering young woman who tried various jobs and in the end makes the surprising decision to follow in her father’s footsteps. If you enjoyed Kurt, you’re sure to enjoy Linda as the investigator.

The Pyramid: And Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries
Before the Frost — featuring Kurt Wallander’s daughter Linda.

Tagged: Henning Mankell, Kurt Wallander, Linda Wallander