Inspector-Wallander.org News Archive

Inspector-Wallander.org
The Site for English-Speaking Fans of Henning Mankell's Detective Series
Featuring Kurt Wallander of Ystad, Sweden,
A small town outside of Malmö in the southern province of Skåne.

News Archive

Before the Frost released in US

Posted 1 February 2005

The week the New Press releases Henning Mankell's Before the Frost for sale in the US. Amazon.com has it for sale and you should be able to find it at your local bookshop this week.

The always dependable Marilyn Stasio comes through with another good review in The New York Times. Amazon.com has some interesting reviews from readers, particularly one from A. Butterfield of the UK:

I think Henning Mankell is trying to up the ante in the Wallander books. The early books were about criminals, often loners. There was always some connection with national or world issues like immigration or racial tension, but the clever bit was how one small event in Ystad reflected world trends.
Lately though, Mankell is concentrating on more and more unlikely situations to, presumably, give the books a bigger impact. The trouble is, it has the opposite effect.
...
All these criticisms aside, I still largely enjoyed the book, though I found much of the melodramatic religious stuff tedious. There are moments of great tension and horror, just like in any Mankell crime novel, but it seems to be spread more thinly than usual.

Continue on to Amazon.com for the full review (archived here).

You can also get more information and reviews for Before the Frost from our previous coverage of the UK release. And don't miss Laurie Thompson's thoughts in the Swedish Book Review.