The Pyramid

by Henning Mankell

Overview

The missing piece of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander mystery series: the story of Kurt Wallander's beginnings. • The mystery thriller series that inspired the Netflix crime drama Young Wallander

Revealing a side of Wallander that we have never seen, the long stories collected in The Pyramid are vintage Mankell. Here, we see Wallander on his homicide first case as a twenty-one-year-old patrolman, as a young father facing unexpected danger on Christmas Eve, as a middle-aged detective with his marriage on the brink, as a newly separated investigator solving the brutal murder of a local photographer, and finally as a veteran detective, with his signature methodical and instinctive work style, discovering unexpected connections between a downed plane and the assassination of a pair of spinster sisters.

In these five riveting tales we watch Kurt Wallander come into his own not only as a detective but as a human being

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400095827
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/06/2009
Series:	Kurt Wallander Series , #10
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.24(w) x 8.02(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

Internationally bestselling novelist and playwright Henning Mankell has received the German Tolerance Prize and the U.K.’s Golden Dagger Award and has been nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize three times. His Kurt Wallander mysteries have been published in thirty-three countries and consistently top the bestseller lists in Europe. He divides his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he has worked as the director of Teatro Avenida since 1985.  

Hometown:

Mozambique, Africa

Date of Birth:

February 3, 1948

Place of Birth:

Stockholm, Sweden

Education:

Folkskolan Elementary Shool, Sveg; Högre Allmäna Läroverket, Borås

Editorial Reviews

"A marvel of spare, purposeful prose and artful storytelling."—St. Petersburg Times

"Excellent. . . . Sure to bring [Mankell's] fans stampeding back into the fold."—The New York Times

“Absorbing, chilling, and dripping with evil atmosphere.”–The Times, London

“Superb. . . .Mankell has mastered his craft."—Tampa Bay Tribune

“A triumph. . . . Mankell’s quiet specificity is mesmerizing. . . . They are surprising small masterpieces.”–Times Literary Supplement, London

“No crime writer balances genre conventions with personal concerns as well as Mankell.”–Boston Globe

“Kurt Wallander remains one of the most impressive and credible creations of crime fiction today.” –The Guardian, London

“This book is Mankell in top form. . . . For Mankell/Wallander fans [it is] a must read.”–The Midwest Review

“The Wallander series . . . [is] essential reading for all crime fiction fans, and this collection adds an indispensable chapter to the saga.”–Booklist

From the Publisher

The five stories in this outstanding collection from Mankell (Faceless Killers) provide glimpses into Kurt Wallander's early life as a policeman as well as paint evocative portraits of contemporary Swedish society. An unremarkable businessman is poisoned in "The Man on the Beach" but-in typical Mankell fashion-the case is larger, more complex and more interesting than it first appears. In the volume's best entry, "The Death of the Photographer," Simon Lamberg takes studio portraits of weddings and children, but a couple of nights each week, he uses his darkroom to distort published photographs of politicians and newsworthy people for a macabre personal scrapbook. It's a bizarre hobby, but the cause of Lamberg's brutal, apparently senseless death is an even stranger puzzle. Like the Wallander novels, these stories rank among the finest police procedurals being written today. (Sept.)

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Publishers Weekly

The early adventures of Kurt Wallander, that most human of all fictional detectives, are revealed in a collection of short mysteries. In 1969, the time of "Wallander's First Case," the melancholy Swede is a callow 21. Eager to please, his sleuthing talent still embryonic, he stumbles into a solution. By 1975, the Wallander of "The Man with the Mask," who's clearly grown more comfortable in his professional skin, confronts and collars the crazed killer of a harmless old shopkeeper. "The Man on the Beach," set in 1987, is a variation on the locked-room mystery. By this time the hero is 40, ruefulness has set in and Wallander has begun to think of himself as "a police officer from another age." "The Death of the Photographer," set a year later, is noteworthy mostly because nonviolent Wallander comes close to killing a man. In "The Pyramid," the last, longest and best of these prequels, Wallander has full-blown weltschmerz. It's 1989 and the chief inspector frets about his health, worries about going bald, misses his divorced wife, battles his cunning father (hilariously), yearns to be closer to his daughter and tries to end a soul-draining love affair while he skillfully, relentlessly pursues a slick, remorseless drug dealer. Four OK stories capped by a perfect gem of a novella, "The Pyramid," which no fan of Wallander (The Man Who Smiled, 2006, etc.) should miss.

Kirkus Reviews