Some of the best police procedural/mystery writing is coming out of the Scandinavian countries. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, for example, also come from Sweden, and their work is consistently excellent. Not to mention there must ne some very good translators working on these books.Mankell, who wrote this in 1993 as apartheid was beginning to crumble, has little love for those white South Africans who wanted to retain the status quo. In this, one of his lengthier works, his protagonist, Chief Inspector Kurt Wallender, from the small town of Ystad, is puzzled by the seemingly random death of a woman real estate agent. The case becomes more baffling when a house blows up leaving only traces of a powerful Russian-built radio transmitter and the remnants of a pistol manufactured in South Africa.
Mankell deftly – normally I dislike books with multiple points of view, but they are nicely integrated here – alternates between the committee and its representatives who are planning to assassinate Nelson Mandela in hopes of instigating a violent chaotic response from the black community that would force de Klerk to rigidly suppress it , and de Klerk’s intelligence man who has to work in secret himself to find the truth.
The albino lioness, visited by one of de Klerk’s agents on safari, becomes a metaphor not just for the South African white community, dangerous and unpredictable, but also the blindness and density of fog. What appears to be light may not be.
