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| Before the Frost released in UK and Australia;
three reviews |
| Posted 3 September 2004, updated 29 September
2004 |
 Before
the Frost, featuring Linda Wallander and her father Kurt, is
now in for sale in the UK and Australia. You can order the novel
from
Amazon.co.uk or
Shearer's Bookshop. The North American release will follow on
February 28, 2005.For anyone that does not know already, Before
the Frost is the first of three novels that Henning Mankell has
planned to write to succeed the Kurt Wallander series. In addition
to Linda Wallander, both Kurt and Stefan Lindman are in the series.
Joan Smith
covers Before the Frost for the Guardian:
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The novel opens with two apparently
unrelated acts of violence: a massacre in Guyana and the
sadistic killing of half a dozen swans on a lake in Sweden.
Linda has left police college and is sharing her father's
small flat while she waits for more suitable accommodation
to become available. At a loose end - she has a couple of
months to wait before her official starting date - she tags
along on one of Wallander's investigations. She is further
drawn in when an old friend disappears, not long after confiding
to Linda that she believes she has sighted her long-lost
father. Without this plot thread, Linda's part in the
investigation would be hard to justify (and it is questionable
whether father and daughter would, in real life, be allowed
to work together in the same small police station). This
is not, however, the chief question mark that hovers over
Before the Frost. As in The Return of the Dancing Master,
the central mystery involves a conspiracy of such proportions
that it is hard to credit; Mankell has moved from the common-or-garden
serial killers of his early novels to neo-Nazis in his previous
book and religious fanatics here.
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Marcel Berlins has
a short review for The Times:
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The book is being promoted as
a "Linda Wallander mystery", the first of a "gripping new
series". Linda, as Mankell's readers will know, is Kurt's
somewhat difficult daughter from his former marriage. She
has now unexpectedly decided to become a policewoman in
the Ystad force, from which her father is soon to retire.
She also inherits her father's limelight spot in the Mankell
novels. In Before the Frost, Daddy Kurt is still very
much in charge of the investigation. Linda has only just
qualified as a cop.
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Michael Shmith
reviews Before the Frost for Australia's The Age:
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Before the Frost finds [Kurt]
Wallander winding up. He is no longer the mainstay of the
narrative; that is left to his daughter, Linda, who has
finished her police training and is about to don the uniform
described by her father as upsetting. "From the first day
you put on the uniform, it will be, inescapably, in your
life," he tells her. Linda is joining the force at Ystad;
but even before this, she has inherited the Wallander investigative
sixth sense. One of her friends, Anna, disappears, having
told Linda that she has sighted her father who had himself
vanished many years before.
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Thanks to Rachel for finding these reviews and sending them in.
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