Henning Mankell's The Fifth Woman

Recently, I finished The Fifth Woman, a Kurt Wallander thriller by Swedish mystery writer Henning Mankell.

I have the book in its mass market paperback edition, which was just released this past summer. Even in this portable format, it still runs to 654 pages - about twice the length of the other Wallander books I've read. It's far and away the longest - and the most ambitious - of the Wallander books I've read so far.

In the book, Wallander must investigate the mysterious and grotesquely violent deaths of some men in the environs of Ystad, his home town. A retired car dealer with a fondness for writing poems about birds is found impaled on wooden stakes in a pit that he has fallen into. Another man who runs a flower shop is found strangled in a forest.

Wallander and his team of investigators are baffled and horrified by the crimes. As the story twists and turns, it becomes evident to them that the killer may be a woman bent on revenge for violence she has suffered at the hands of men. The men who were killed - in spite of the placid appearance they presented to the world - all had a history of violent relationships with women.

The story is a bleak one, with grim depictions of the grisly crimes. Wallander must also confront the more troubling aspects of his own past relationship with Mona, his ex-wife.

In style, the novel departs from previous Wallander tales in that the story isn't entirely seen from Wallander's viewpoint. Chapters with Wallander are intercut with chapters seen from the woman murderer's viewpoint, so we sometimes find out things that Wallander hasn't yet learned. In these chapters, we learn that the killer's mother was murdered on a trip to Africa while staying with a group of four nuns. She was the unidentified fifth woman of the group.

The killer learns of her mother's death from a remorseful woman police investigator in the African country who had sent her a letter explaining that her death had been covered up by local authorities. Knowledge of her mother's death breaks the woman and she embarks on her murders, methodically killing one by one local men she knows to have had been in brutally violent relationships with women.

The novel is complex and harrowing. My only real objection to it is that perhaps Mankell lays on the adversity a bit too heavily. Wallander's father dies during the novel, adding a somber note to an already serious theme. There is also a pointless subplot about a vigilante militia being formed in Ystad to fight back against the murders that could just as easily have been left out. In spite of that, the novel is still effective, chilling and provocative. Well worth a read.