I was looking forward to reading this one because it hadn't been adapted for Kenneth Brannagh's Wallander TV series, which I've been a fan of. I suppose I should have wondered instead why they'd skipped it. This one starts off ok, with an intriguing mystery of suited men, dead of gunshot wounds, adrift in a dinghy. There's some interesting hangovers from Faceless Killers, not least Wallander's former confidant, the deceased detective Rydberg haunting his decision making. Mankell tries to establish two of the underused characters from the first book, Martinsson and Svedberg, and Wallander is having more health problems but before we can relax into the investigation he introduces a twist and Wallander ends up going solo for some extended cloak and daggering in Riga, Latvia. It's very much a book nailed into 1991, in that transitional period between the Baltic state's break with Russia and eventual adoption into the EU. Descriptively there's hardly anything beyond generic urban areas with brief statements of being in the countryside. Wallander voices Mankell's philosophical musings about national identity interspersed with dollops of canine symbolism. Let's face it Wallander isn't James Bond. In fact he's probably more in line with Michael Crawford's Condorman. I look forward to reading the next book in the series which hopefully will have Wallander, shouting at his subordinates, stuffing down cold pizza and struggling with his personal life in Sweden - where he belongs.